Bernardo Atxaga, National Prize for Spanish Literature and Liber Prize 2021, dazzles with an exciting book about life and death
Two brothers face collective evil together; a man relives the death of his friend’s son in the light of LSD; in the Obaba-Ugarte cemetery, two lecturers deliver a delirious talk to the assembled crowd about life and death; an owl turns out to be an indispensable piece to solve various crimes.
In “From the Other Side”, which seems to be narrated by voices that come from nature itself, we find the best Atxaga, the one that has moved readers since the publication of “Obabakoak” until today: the writer who tells life and death as two sides of the same thing, the chain of affections that bind us to each other, the sensitivity of animals, violence, evil, loss and loneliness of the human being.
In the stories of this book a single story is told, ours, that of all of us who have been, are and will be. And along with life, there is also room for the fantastic, what happens in the diffuse margins that separate reality from dream, hallucination or revelation.