Before the darkness comes

It rarely happens that a novel literally subjugates its readers, I mean that for a few days life starts to revolve around the attention we devote to reading a work of fiction. And that afterwards, once the reading is finished, it starts to revolve around the impact the novel has left on us, the emotions it has made us feel, or the ideas it has summoned, or brought to life, within our thoughts. This has recently happened to me with Before the Darkness Comes, by Fausto Puerto Quetglas, which has just been published by Angle Editorial. It has happened to me, moreover, twice: when I read it in original form, about a year ago, and now that I have reread it as a published book. The author, I will not hide it, is a good friend of mine, but believe me that this is entirely irrelevant: the novel would be magnificent regardless even if Puerto Quetglas and I did not know each other at all, as is possible for many of you, unless you are customers of the Món de Llibres bookstore, in Manacor, which the author has been running for more than twenty years.

Puerto Quetglas, therefore, debuts as a novelist at fifty-one years old and does so with a work of splendid maturity, which has surprised those of us who knew he was an extremely solvent reader and prescriber, but were unaware that he was also an equally demanding and refined writer. It will also surprise all readers who approach it with hunger and thirst for good literature, because they will be satisfied. The less prior information they have, perhaps the better. Let us say, by way of guidance, that the story starts from the search that the protagonist makes about Philipp Mainländer, a forgotten German philosopher considered a precursor of nihilism and an antecedent to Nietzsche. But this is only one facet of the prism through which Puerto Quetglas invites us to contemplate the human condition.

Before the darkness comes tells the story of an investigation, an escape, and a reunion. The writing is precise, rhythmic, and well-measured, and it welcomes and surrounds us like a Bill Evans record, perhaps the Sunday at the Village Vanguard. It is difficult to escape the charm of the main character and that of Mathieu Renard, who will seduce you without remedy. It is a novel that will be considered “philosophical,” or “of ideas,” but that should not hold any reader back, because—as happens in the best novels—simultaneously with the silence of thought we perceive the bustle of life, the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual disorder that ultimately gives us the strength to live. And it is a novel that confronts us with dilemmas and questions that are difficult to answer. For example: are we humans flawed and disappointing creatures, who—as the aforementioned Philipp Mainländer opined—should abstain from sexual relations so as not to perpetuate our failed species? Or, on the contrary, are we perhaps lost and helpless beings, but endowed with a dignity that can be saved by a force called love? This, among other things, is what this novel is about. And believe me, it is prodigious.