The obsessed woman

Like previous works by Miyas. "The World," "The Chaos of the Name," "Laura and Julio," "Thus Was Unity," the dividing wall between reality and unreality, between the possible and the impossible, fades away, and dualities continue to unfold that, as much as they resemble, contradict each other, as if contradiction in its extreme form leads to proximity and similarity. More than other stories, the thought of writing, and the repeated effort to deconstruct language, but not through experimentation with it, rather an attempt to understand it and the juxtaposition of its words. For "words call out to words" in the same way that the described calls out to the attribute, and perhaps in the same way that characters summon events. And if we consider that each character has their secret: old Emirita, who is ill and keeps the murder incident a secret as she keeps the pistol, and old Serafin, who hides his feelings, and young Kholia, who revolves in her secret linguistic orbit, then this novel must be the other face of Miyas, hidden behind the narrator, preoccupied with death as much as with writing, evaluating his novel as real or fake. The obsessed woman, perhaps, is Miyas himself, in his seventies, approaching an unknown future of which he only has a blurred image, a blur in the transitional zone between realism and surrealism, the zone of borders and airports that belong to no one, where we find ourselves mere strangers, in both senses. "How can a novel be a novel if it isn’t strange?" This was Miyas’s response in a newspaper interview when he was told "It’s a very strange novel." But, as Edward Said says, it exists in this world — perhaps that’s why it must be strange.