Toda La Soledad del Centro de la Tierra / (Loneliness at the Center of the Earth

Una novela tan breve como intensa, a medio camino entre la ficci n y el testimonio real, sobre el desamparo, la orfandad de la infancia y la crueldad que el hombre ejerce contra el hombre mismo. En un pueblo olvidado del norte de M xico, un ni o camina por una carretera oscura, decidido a encontrar a los padres que lo abandonaron. El Chaparro, como lo llama la abuela Librada y el resto de su parentela, es menudo y escurridizo, campe n insuperable en el juego de las escondidas, gracias a un fant stico superpoder que l cree detentar: es capaz de volverse invisible mientras imagina que el viejo ropero en donde se oculta de sus primos es el pozo sin fondo que aparece, siempre ciego y amenazante, en las leyendas que se cuenta su familia. De este pozo insondable emergen, en una suerte de coro ciego y doliente, las voces de los incontables desaparecidos del pueblo, v ctimas de una ola de violencia que amenaza con aniquilarlo todo, con reducirlo a muerte y cenizas. En esta novela tan breve como intensa, a medio camino entre la poes a y la narrativa, la ficci n y el testimonio real, Luis Jorge Boone teje con extraordinaria sensibilidad una trama donde el desamparo, la orfandad de la infancia y el luto humano se interrogan por la proporci n de alma que sobrevive a la crueldad que el hombre ejerce contra el hombre mismo. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION This novel, as brief as it is intense, and halfway between poetry and narrative, fiction and real testimony, centers on helplessness, childhood orphan hood, and the cruelty that mankind exercises against their fellow men. In a forgotten town in northern Mexico, a boy walks down a dark road, determined to find the parents who abandoned him. El Chaparro, as Grandma Librada and the rest of his family call him, is small and elusive, and an undefeated champion at the game of hide and seek, thanks to a fantastic superpower that he believes he possesses: he is capable of becoming invisible as he imagines that the old closet where he usually hides from his cousins is the dark bottomless well that appears in all the folktales that the elders talk about. In a kind of sorrowful choir, from this unfathomable well we see the countless voices of those who have disappeared from the town emerge, victims of a wave of violence that threatens to destroy everything, to reduce it all to death and ashes. In this novel as brief as it is intense, and halfway between poetry and narrative, fiction and real testimony, Luis Jorge Boone weaves with extraordinary sensitivity a plot where helplessness, childhood orphan hood, and mourning are questioned by the part of our soul that has survived the great cruelty that mankind exercises against his fellow men.