One spring day, Don Juan lands in the garden of a cook who runs a restaurant near the ruins of a French monastery. A friendship is established between the two, and the adventurous traveler tells his friend on dark evenings his stories with women, each of whom is of indescribable beauty.
There are literary characters who are born and do not die. Over the years, these characters witness multiple births, each time taking on a different form and a new dimension. Among these characters is Don Juan, to whom Peter Handke returns in this novel, to raise many questions, and to present his reflections on love, the spirituality of love, and the passage of time, destroying the common image of his hero, presenting a new one. Claiming that all previous Don Juan characters were fake, and that "Don Juan" is the real and honest one.
I wrote you with an alphabet of letters like a soul reciting with the calmness of its stillness
And with the noise of its radiance, and the trembling of its fear in your absence, and it is completed
Her look, the muteness of her words, and the melody of a bird flirting with space
And with an eagerness to meet, extending to no end..
Following the Pinochet coup, which overthrew President Salvador Allende, thousands of Chilean families emigrated to escape the new regime, including the Lucho family, who headed to Germany.
For his parents, time stopped the moment he left Chile, waiting for the moment of return, and the world was divided into two parts: the lost homeland, and the remaining countries, and like an entire generation that refuses to accept what happened, they sank into (ghettos) of sadness; Europe was offering them lungs of freedom, but it was also inflicting on them the pain of distance.
As for Lucho, Germany was a different country full of what was worth living: he had daily challenges in the street and school to live, new cultures to discover, friendships, enmities, quarrels, and the first heartbeats he had to experience; All this without forgetting his inherited duty towards his motherland.
About the obsessions of asylum, failures, dreams, and disappointments, Scarmetta leaves his teenage hero to tell his story, presenting us with a charming model of friendship, companionship, and the struggle for justice.
