It's not the first time I read this book. It is, however, the first time I read it in Spanish, the native language of the writer. Things have a new meaning all of a sudden. And it has an inherent dangerousness of the continuous tendency of correlating the character's lives and experiences to ours. This applies automatically to the central themes of the book, among which there's loneliness (understood as the alienation of mind and spirit) and oblivion (as a result of a strange mental illness, of a contagious insomnia that threatens everyone). Words have a thousand meanings and names tell a hundred stories about the characters. There are hidden messages, there's a meaning in every word he wrote and one just has to discover it. It is inevitable, nonetheless, to translate his words into your own expressions, based on your own experiences or feelings at the moment.

Dangerously addictive... and dangerously depressive as well. Because it's not easy to read it and ignore the fact that you could experience the same feelings as those of one character or another. You turn one with the book and the lives in it.

Writing about the insomnia (and, as a consequence, oblivion) epidemia, I have just recalled one of Jose Saramago's book, "Blindness" ("Ensayo sobre la ceguera" in Spanish), which focuses on the human instinct of survival which revives and turns into a violent expression of the deepest needs of the human race, when an epidemia of blindness affects everyone...

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