Desired Influence, by Guillermo Alonso: How a Leader Lives in a World of Cynics

How does a leader live among cynics? How do you become clean-eyed if you live surrounded by the reflection of people who are selfish, mean, and responsible for unhealthy relationships? This dilemma is what he is planning Desired effect Sex Paral, the final novel by Guillermo Alonso (Pontevedra, 1982). Beyond the size of the accounts Language between teeth (Círculo de Tiza, 2023) and series Vivan Los Caballes Hombres (Free Kids, 2019) and Special offers for affection (Paripé Books, 2021), writer and web editor of ICON magazine, updates the picaresque by polishing his style sensitive to moral hierarchies. He sneaks without superiority and with a lot of sympathy into a carnival of characters who aspire to shine as long as they are able inside. Beings so keen on hedonism and privilege that their pulse will transport the reader from tenderness to astonishment among the corpses that they will freeze to realize that this nervous laughter of ours is a direct ticket to the living room of hell.

In this non-linear novel that jumps in time between Madrid and an idyllic Greek island, Gaspard is a 19-year-old who falls alone in life after the death of her mother, a woman who was as eccentric as she was brilliant, and whose past is broken on the inside. The existence of the protagonist will be determined by that revered woman who created him without a priest upon seeing him among rubber girls and fleeting lovers in the common room of a comfortable hotel where Gaspard has been a boy forever since he was conscious. Convinced that he must avenge his mother’s death, the young man begins to define his identity as an orphan by serving the rich. First he will work for Pandora, a widow obsessed with her appearance and self performance From happiness, she is addicted to giving countless parties in the most debauched Madrid, where the trees are supposedly the best green “as if nature sends the best pollen to sprout where there is new money.” He then travels to Cyclada to care for the Ottaviano, a mysterious pair of wealthy men who were disfigured after an accident and whose contract prohibited the possibility of asking questions. In this palace on the beach, there is a golden cage from which Gaspard comes to ask him if he bathes in the sea and will be overruled because it is expected that no worker will bathe in the pool, where all the mysteries he has carried since he was a child will spill out. How does he become a leader when he encounters a world of people who treat him like a commodity?

Al read Desired effect It should not go unnoticed that its author, is also the recipient of the Ondas Prize for it Podcast conversation Arsenic caviar Leading with writer and journalist Beatriz Serrano, he spends years working as a chronicler of aspirations and trends in an increasingly sad world. It is from Gaspard’s supposed point of view that decadence is clearly evident in the imposed extravagance that defines good taste. This young man, the “expert at being invisible,” lives his itinerant life with practical resignation but openness to the places of life; This natural survivor who will also deal with violence in his initial sexual journey, will become a hairless picaro of a fool who knows how to anticipate every shot of those who want to carve out his fate. You will think of Gaspard in one of the first contemplative festivals of the rich that so well defines the drifts of our time, the one in which, without the import of the Kuna, we would still be lost: “If the first hour was contagious to all and the desire to appear virtuous, then the last hour was contagious and the desire to appear absurd.”