Montano's Malady

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At the end of the twentieth century, the young Montano, who had just published his dangerous novel about the curious case of writers who give up writing, got caught in the net of his own fiction and, despite his compulsive tendency towards writing, suffered a complete block, paralysis, a tragic inability to write.

At the end of the twentieth century — today, November 15, 2000, to be more precise — I visited him at his home in Nantes and, just as I had expected, found him so sad and so dried up that some verses by Pushkin could well be used to describe him: Montano “lives wandering / in the shade of the woods / with the dangerous novel.”

The good thing is that wandering in the shade of the woods has led my son — the fact is that Montano is my son — to recover a certain passion for reading, and I have benefited from this. Not long ago, and on his recommendation, I read Prosa de la frontera propia, a novel recently published, by Julio Arward, a strange writer whom I had never fully trusted, believing him simply to be playing at being the double of the novelist Justo Navarro.

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