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Lo que tú piensas (Kailas, 2008)
Crimes occur in the best of families, and a family is a portrait of the surrounding world depicted through relentless laws such as chance, silence and fear; or perhaps death, expression and will.
The three members of the family in this novel, Carlos, Amparo and Jacobo, do everything in their power to elude those laws, to escape from the idea they have fashioned of themselves and of their own reality. And so, the father may be a murderer or a suicide case; the mother, a victim or an accomplice; and the son, a child and adult at the same time who has to make sense of what goes on around him.
Lo que tú piensas ("What you think") is a book about the problems of communication and growing up, of fatherhood and life together, but also of the hell we can all carry within. But what does it take for that hell to mount to the surface? Maybe nothing more than a chance occurrence or being born in times that made us internalise silence and terror.
José María Pérez Zúñiga takes the psychological novel one step further by making the secret lie in the mind of his characters, and simultaneously in the mind of the reader. With its circular, three-faceted structure, this book may cause serious side effects.
“I think his latest novel, Lo que tú piensas, is superb. Zúñiga is a past master of narrative pace and literary expression, the art of riveting the reader and creating dramatic interest and plausibility. Just as with all good fiction, the book is a weave of lies that shouts out a deep-reaching, universal truth and exudes a precise understanding of the human soul and the strings that drive certain contemporary attitudes”.
Ángel Esteban, Granada Hoy
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Rompecabezas, (Seix Barral, 2006)
Young and jobless, Julio Brito doesn’t know what to do with his life. One day he is visited by a disquieting female angel who proposes that he search for his father who went missing ever since leaving the city five years before, the same five years that have passed since the death of his mother.
Attracted by the woman and driven by the desire to escape from his anodyne existence, Julio embarks on an outer and inner quest, not knowing that this will take him to the darkest depths of his being.
Reality or dream? Is it possible to be in two places at the same time? Does Julio Brito know who he really is? To find out, the protagonist of this unusual private adventure has to bear the consequences of his own discoveries, but not only that. If he wants to see things through to the very end, he will have to become the hand that wreaks revenge, and maybe a potential parricide. Or maybe not?
Zúñiga meticulously matches substance and style in his writing. With a steady hand, he is constructing a new and solid form of literary architecture far removed from ephemeral trends and committed to a creative and distinctive narrative technique that still stays mindful of its ultimate objective of tempting and captivating the reader.
“José María Pérez Zúñiga has written a stunning novel. (...) Rompecabezas seems to start all over again when it has reached the end. As all excellent books do, it keeps on running through your imagination when you’ve finished reading it. A good novel, like an enjoyable journey, can work a change in us, altering the way we perceive the world. That’s why the two are so alike”.
Justo Navarro, El Fingidor
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