El amor es más frío que la muerte

the long version

In a country ravaged by the plague, the protagonist of this dystopian fable flees from the hospital for the terminally ill where he had been confined and begins a painful journey until he reaches a barren wasteland, similar to the icy mountains of the moon, which reminds him of the territory wild where he spent the first years of his life. Always guided by a luminous, tender, festive and, at times, perverse Eros, the narrator will undertake from that dreamlike space a strange journey through the labyrinths of his mind and the meanders of his memory, from which situations that border on reverie will emerge. madness: his father participating in the hunt for a young nympho witch, his dead mother metamorphosed into a voracious thirteen-year-old girl, or himself caressing, in the basements of a Tokyo dive, the breasts of a porn comic beauty. In the splendor of his creative maturity, the Venezuelan novelist Ednodio Quintero offers us, in the first person and with the brilliant prose to which he has accustomed us, certain life experiences that oscillate between what he has called an obscene exhibition of the self and the more radical fiction: the Grim Reaper, playing dominoes, appears as a character in the novel written by Pierre-Emilio, the narrator's alter ego, and accompanies the writer, smoking and telling jokes, on his sleepless nights in the hospital. Love is colder than death is, in short, a fascinating and daring bet on literature, pure literature: dreams, secrets, memories, thoughts. --