The Same Fire

The Same Fire (First International Independent Literary Prize Orizzonte Atlantico for a novel published in 2019) is a bildungsroman novel and an existential autobiography based on the author’s experiences during the last military dictatorship in his country. The real events, names, country, and the subsequent evolution of various tragedies have been altered to protect the truth. With a syntactical structure lacking the relative pronoun (que/that), the novel expresses in language the same functional absences that exist in the absolute memory of its protagonist, the child José Gabriel, without preventing him from representing a world that his exaggerated memory records in detail but his understanding cannot fully grasp.
“One morning, the children were playing in an old wagon when a gunshot rang out. Why are we born, if we have to die? The years go by, like the trees pass by the train window; and Jorge continues searching for the answer.” Eduardo Galeano.