The novel that confirms Miquel de Palol as one of the titans of contemporary literature

The declassified files of this despicable and sordid human being known as Jeffrey Epstein confirm a terrible truth that a few of us had long suspected: that the world imitates the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Miquel de Palol more than the other way around.

Miquel de Palol has constructed one of the most ambitious narrative architectures in global literature, a complete and quantum cosmos where stories multiply in parallel to infinity and where everything is thought about and questioned with dizzying lucidity, but also with an anarchic sensuality that is only comparable to that of its peers. His narratological proposal is not only a colossal game of ingenuity nor an extraordinary exercise in formal virtuosity, capable of confirming the masterful gifts of this unique writer on the planet, but a radical exploration of knowledge, of the gears of power, of the potency of fictions, and of the way in which stories (dis)order the dangerous universe with a universe. Each of his books seems like a monumental secret continent made of corridors, mirrors, and resonating chambers where the reader advances with the joy of one who discovers new dimensions of being and of all humanity. With dense and precise prose—cultural and metaliterary, sardonic and solemn, architectural and musical—the author constructs verbal monuments capable of sustaining stories, myths, enigmas, and plots that teeter on the brink of the abyss with a hyperrealistic and prophetic character. For all these reasons, Miquel Palol transforms the art of narrative into an ambitious intellectual machine and a soaring adventure, demonstrating that the novel can simultaneously be an advanced mirror, a Kafkaesque labyrinth, an instrument of wisdom, and a grotesque celebration of life.

Published by Navona, like his latest titles, in a commendable defense of one of our best authors as well as one of the most unjustly underrated, the novel Even sooner than ever This novel confirms Miquel de Palol as one of the great titans of contemporary literature and, at the same time, as a narrator capable of weaving together private and collective history. Starting with a narrative device as elegant as it is demanding (a structure that moves from the present to the past as a reverse intrigue strategy), the novel unfolds over more than eight hundred pages of fertile intensity, where each chapter reorders the meaning of what we think we know and delves deeper into the psychology of characters who grow, grow, and grow; relentless, like a Jodorowskian psychomagical ritual.

The central figure is Aurelio Salabreda, a prominent business heir caught between the weight of his legacy and the need to envision a more creative and artistic way of being in the world. He seeks to defy his destiny and serves as a symbolic axis for a country in transformation and, indeed, in decline. Around him, the figures of Carlota, Sabrina, Kylie, Nerea, and Gumersind contribute a sophisticated polyphonic sonata. The novel, which engages with the great realist/romantic tradition of the nineteenth century—by way of Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky—without relinquishing its current postmodern complexity, is also a philosophical meditation on power. Furthermore, thanks to its dizzying and thrilling pages, we reach the pinnacle of one of Palolo's maxims: that Culture, with a capital C, is increasingly becoming a space of resistance. With precise, demanding, and surprisingly vibrant prose that revels in provocative and paradoxical pronouncements, De Palol constructs an immense narrative fresco that not only explains three generations and two families but also questions the reader about what it means to inherit, to challenge, to lose, and to reimagine other possible futures. The result is a monumental work that demands effort and rewards it with a soaring literary experience, one of those novels that never truly end and that complements—perhaps culminates—one of the most sublime bodies of work in world literature.

Read in light of what we've uncovered with the Epstein files, Miquel de Palol's new novel seems to remind us that real power is always orchestrated in the shadows. And as in the marvels of Thomas Pynchon, History is not a backdrop but a complex or unjust machine built in blind spots, while fiction becomes the finest instrument for making these opaque structures visible. From this perspective, Even sooner than ever It not only narrates our country and our essence, it offers a Zeitgeist and a moral cartography of our time, in which literature once again becomes a form of knowledge and an almost desperate invitation to resist.