Adolfo Macías maintains an astonishing publishing rate, not least because of the variety and wealth of his latest titles, all at the Seix Barral publishing house, among which are his latest novels. Ladies Portable Cliff (2014), girls (2016), mythomaniac (2018), the geography of wonder (2020) and, the latest, where the sun loses its kingdom (2023), which is his tenth novel. This closeness in their creations, which I could comment on in other articles, allows me to review what Obra has in Macías’ literary journey.

When I talk about Obra, I don’t mean a specific title, but the meaning of the sequence that contributes to the overall idea of ​​the author. His beginnings as a novelist date back to 2001 with his first novel labyrinth by the sea. Among its constants is the omnipresence of artists, musicians or writers, enriched by a truly astonishing variety of secondary characters who are not part of that bohemia, but with their strangeness and marginality have a decisive influence. In the concept of mythomania, which he deals with in the novel of the same name, the willingness to mythologize artistic creators is coded. The protagonist enters a healing process involving a constellation of characters around him. There is also healing in where the sun loses its kingdomand it was also inside the geography of wonderonly that here the spectrum obeys the social collapse due to the earthquake, while in where the sun loses its kingdom It is about the memories of Carlos, a talented dancer dominated by drug addiction.

Alfaguara Award 2023

It is significant that the dimensions of these last two novels find different channels for dealing with a similar problem of loss: the problem of the individual in relation to his society. The earthquake crisis questioned the mutual dependence of the protagonists, while Carlos’s dependence is limited to an intimate environment, almost strictly familiar, where the roles have a double or triangular dynamic.

Talking about addiction could lead to oversimplification of what makes this particular novel more complex and laborious. It is not about supporting the current idea of ​​the instability of addicts as a self-help manual. Of course, family conflicts, job instability, sentimental uncertainty, close circle are factors that predispose to addiction, and they are precisely suggested in the novel. What is not always possible to see is the freedom of those dangerous vanishing points. What they liberate and what they condemn at the same time, because the excess that Carlos falls into allows him to understand other layers and characters in his environment, but also closes continuity and progress in his career. Drugs open consciousness, cancel conventions, as he says, and take off the “torn social mask”. But the toll for this reach of consciousness is too high and it turns against him. There are tutor figures in where the sun loses its kingdom, as in the case of Alejandro Puma, the despotic dance master, who does not relieve Carlos of his problems, but despite his inconstancy believes in his talent. The path that Carlos will follow to save himself requires hitting rock bottom, and interestingly, it is very important that whoever is going to help him has also been through hell.

An encounter with the stories of Sonia Manzano, Ecuadorian poet, storyteller and pianist

Fiction does not follow the instructions of a manual or protocol when it touches on visible or pressing issues of society. Macías knows how to place, without Manichaeism, a complete view of the human problem that symbolizes many others. This is exactly what a novel is: the possibility of a double reading, both the literal one about the story, and the allusive one, the one that contains other meanings that go beyond the obvious subject. Perhaps that is why art as a subject is a medium that balances convention and rupture. Macías’ characters are part of that border citizenship. And that’s why we need to read novels: to give room to imagination that breaks down barriers, warns us of extreme consequences, but never stops plunging into the unforeseen. In order to achieve this, it is not enough to articulate the story of borders, but also to push the language to its limits, to break it, to crystallize it. where the sun loses its kingdom It is the novel in which Macías achieves his greatest poetic, verbal achievement, taking the risk of upsetting the balance of the overall architecture of the novel. the geography of wonderhis earlier novel, is probably his most complex and best realized in terms of overall composition, but in where the sun loses its kingdom when the concentration on the character’s voice – with the added escape of the delirium of his grandmother, with whom he duets in part of the book – takes him to the depths where the risk and effort of the experience and distance made by the Author are.

From Alexandria to Avignon, second stop

It is now possible to say that Adolfo Macías traced one of the richest and most diverse galleries of characters in Ecuadorian literature in the last twenty years. This capacity for observation is nuanced with a deep understanding of the human mind, its anxieties and shortcomings, its desire and need for healing, and Macías works in accordance with this cathartic feeling. However, art always points a little further, towards an enigma that cannot be rationalized, that needs that unbridled risk of poetry, delirium, which always appears in Macías’s stories and secondary drifts, and which probably expect to open in a channel and achieve that equation in which the greatness of the composition is needed to resist the overflow of delirium, the elusive language of vision, mystery. Macías is at his peak as a writer and is still searching. I cannot but celebrate that inexhaustible path on which the novelist conquers his kingdom. (OR)