-PROLOGUE, by Majo Fontaner-

(This text was originally writed as a Prologue, but finally it was included on the back cover of the printed edition)

 

« The best thing about writing a book like this, is the fact that your friends and those who love you will read your book. Then they will stop loving you. What a relief ! »

 

This novel begins with those words, what may save any further comments. Reproducing the following real dialog between a well known French writer and the author of this book will do:

—You have a problem: you write thinking about young rebels. And people who buy books nowadays are neither one thing, nor the other . Rebellion? it's an anachronism. There are no rebels anymore.

—You’re right. There’s not even young people.

In each page you will find the same sarcastic nonconformism
mounted on the humor of language and situations, that carries a mostly corrosive residual effect. Indeed, it’s not a book without contraindications.

The thin thread leading the narration is a police case, but neither the main character doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to it, even though he could be seriously envolved. It’s because the novel is —above all— the meticulous record of this protagonist’s view and his perplexity in disguise of cynicism walking around about the people and circunstances of our times, which he defines as “the age of affection, that bastard and disabled way of passion”.

Barron’s original style makes us feel that the more hilarious or even fantastic the situations and characters in the novel are presented, the more ordinary and familiar we perceive them. There’s the beggar boy with wheels instead of feet who shelters a biblical and immortal character in his poor cardboard cabin , and there’s the lawyer who lives together with a robot called President Perón, and there’s a romantic couple of twin brother and sister who live together and want to adopt a baby, and there is the calidoscopic and extravagant women catalog that come and go into the protagonist life...

The reader’s feelings are never about oddness but familiarity and complicity, because the motion power of Barron’s imagination is nourished by all what happens out there in the streets… but of course, filtered by his sharp lens of sarcasm.

 

Néstor Barron was born in Buenos Aires, where he lives at this time. In the last 15 years, he wrote numerous books, radio scripts and TV shows. He works as a comics writer for many publishers from Europe, where he also wrote and directed a few documentary films. However, he insists on defining himself as essentially a musician.

Questioned about this novel, instead of giving an analysis from the author’s point of view as the publishers were expecting to, he just sent an email in which he said that his book “might be interesting, since it wasn’t published by any multinational Book Publishing Company”. This kind of answer shows that in his case it’s very hard to trace the real limits between the author and the character.

At this time, Néstor Barron is working on his next novel, called “:JAZZ:” and defined by himself as “the greatest Argentinian psychotic novel” (?), and also on a short-stories collection named “How to kill your mother and the mother of your childs”.