You never feel like reading or writing about these things, but there is only something worse for a small child to die, and that is for a small child to disappear without further ado. It is a nightmare that all parents have, being one day in the park with the children, among the children, happy and watching, in intermittent tension, and suddenly distracting 10 seconds, tearing off a sticker from a swing or reading a message in the phone, and never see your son again, instinctively know that they have taken him, that he has not died but that everything is over for you, that everything you had with him and everything has been interrupted forever what he knew, and that begins an eternal psychological devastation, not a long mourning but an unbearable bad conscience that can only end with your own end. Not knowing if your children are well is almost worse than knowing that they are wrong, because the latter can be changed, there is hope. And, in the case of death, a boy's body can be kissed, he can be fired, he can be fired ... The duel for the death of a child is hell, but a good day ends. A disappearance never ends.

There is something paradoxical in fervently recommending the reading of a book as distressing as today, but it is that with Empty Houses, his first novel, the Mexican sociologist and economist Brenda Navarro (Mexico City, 1982) has achieved an enduring work for a uncomfortable narrative subgenre, which is now praised, as this is the demonstration that a striking masterpiece could be achieved with one of those narratives built on suffering, anguish or pain ..., in the odd chapters, and extreme violence, possessiveness, jealousy, ignorance and, finally, dementia and despair in peers. The book has three parts, divided in turn into two: in one the truncated mother speaks and in the other the false mother. The voice of the first advances through fragments, small sequences overflowing with helplessness and suffering: that of the kidnapper, even brighter and more vivid, written with true literary brilliance, is not an interior monologue but the direct style brought to perfection, not a stream of consciousness but the speech packed and aching, but not run over, of someone to whom bad luck leads to the worst decisions.

For years I have lashed out at those novels written with good scholarships that, without any genuine reason for this, taking advantage of evil, strive to dig into the most rugged affairs, not only neutralizing their possible denouncing power but managing to make unlikely and forced phenomena that, in truth, they cause many millions of people to suffer that would deserve a better testimony, a cleaner chronicle of what has complicated or energized their lives. What we find in Empty Houses is completely different, because it is a terrible but beautiful novel that shows without any sweetener that almost nobody is right, but that everyone has reasons, no matter how sick they are. Navarro departs and lets two stunned women be the ones who truthfully assume the word, and behind them is the author's intelligence, sensitivity and commitment, determined to truly meditate, without obeying fashion, about undesirable phenomena, about pulverized lives.

The result is shocking, an amazing reading experience. We are facing an important book, an admirable debut, and its publication should become news that reaches all corners of our language, and others.

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