Movimiento único
(Unique Movement) “I met Roberto Bolaño in October 1999, three months after he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize that year for The Savage Detectives. And something in my life (I realized later but had no idea at the time) was set in motion.”
Thus, begins the story of Santiago Novoa, a young journalist who lives in Ramos, a Buenos Aires suburb. One night in 1999, he sends an email to Roberto Bolaño asking him for an interview. From then on, the life of this young journalist (who earns his living interviewing authors for local newspapers and writing book reviews for a magazine in Buenos Aires) will be full of intense motion as he sets off on a path that will take him from Ramos to Barcelona.
The road, however, will not be easy. First, he will become a ghostwriter for a famous novelist and also the lover of one of the members of the military dictatorship: the Almirante, a fearsome figure that Santiago has to call. And later, one in Barcelona, there will be pain, madness and estrangement. However, in that unfamiliar city, he will also reconnect with Roberto Bolaño, a man who will be his mentor, his guiding star, always in motion. A movement that seems ongoing, unique.
A novel about becoming a writer and about the more personal, less well-known side of author Roberto Bolaño.
PRESS
«With a hypnotic and hypnotized voice, Gándara masterfully debuts and demonstrates that he has learned all there is to learn. » Rodrigo Fresán
«This beautiful novel is a sentimental education, a portrait of the budding artist and a moving literary confession. Gándara has one of those rare voices that takes the secrets out of the experience, unable of lying to himself and of lying to us.» Juan Gabriel Vásquez
«A highly engaging and deeply moving account of a life shaped, changed and set in movement by literature. This is a story of emigration and emancipation, of a young man finding his feet in a new country, but it also explores, with clear-eyed directness, the literary microcosms of Buenos Aires and Barcelona. With fresh style and agile movement, Gándara’s novel celebrates a literature inseparable from the adventure of living.» Chris Andrews, University of Western Sydney