Fracture

Author: Andrés Neuman «He showed me his scars. A fine framework on the lower arms and the back. He seemed to carry a tree. Then he saw mines. We felt light, somewhat ugly and very handsome. Two survivors.» Mr. Watanabe, survivor of the nuclear bomb, feels like a refugee of his own memory and is about to take one of the most crucial decisions of his life. The earthquake preceding the Fukushima accident provokes a plate movement that stirs the collective past. Four women tell her lives and her memories of Watanabe to an enigmatic Argentine journalist, an emotional and political tour of cities such as Tokyo, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires or Madrid. This intersection of languages, countries and couples reveals how nothing happens in only one place, how every event expends until it makes the antipodes hake. The way in which societies remember, and above all, forget. In Fractura interweave love and humour, history and energy, the beauty that emerges from the broken things. With this novel Andrés Neuman forcefully returns to the long-winded narrative, genre in which he made his name internationally with El viajero del siglo [Traveler of the Century: a Novel], and he signs his major work. «There are many novels in this novel. The observations on life as a couple are so accurate that one gets frightened; in the same way as the emotions and thoughts of these four women are very accurate. At the same time there are moments of exquisite sense of humour. The ecological sensibility of the novel is extraordinary, and it runs through it like a skeleton, but culminates above all in the very beautiful final section. An ambitious novel in the best sense of the word.»