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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
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Biography, Literature & Literary studies

CABALLO SEA LA NOCHE / MAY THE NIGHT BE A HORSE

Alejandro Morellón

In brutal, original prose Caballo sea la noche / May the Night Be a Horse explores gender identity, memory, coming of age, motherhood, and the dissolution of language in the face of trauma.

In the absence of his father and his older brother, Alan coexists with his mother in the house that is both bastion and ruin, both a refuge from and a testimony to tragedy. We encounter two broken characters who struggle between madness and sanity, and interrogate questions of desire, death, abandonment, identity, and guilt, ever in fear that the final hour of confrontation will arrive: the forced revelation of lived experience through language. May the Night be a Horse narrates a family's utter collapse, when the past and the present become a delirium, a maddened voice, the urgent need to escape or reconstruct what remnants still linger as a means of propelling oneself into the future. This novel is the beginning of that reconstruction, the decisive moment in which the survivors of catastrophe seek to redeem themselves, liberate themselves, and reestablish their ties with the world. A follow-up to his last book of short stories, winner of the IV Gabriel García Márquez Short Story Prize, Alejandro Morellón's debut novel features unbridled, poetic prose reminiscent of Clarice Lispector and Samuel Beckett, in an unrestrained and reflexive text in which we never know whether the night will reign or whether the light will finally reveal the painful secrets at the heart of any truth. Alejandro Morellón (1985) was born and still resides in Madrid, Spain. He is the author of La noche en que caemos, which won the 2013 MonteLeón Foundation Award, El estado natural de las cosas, which won the 2017 Gabriel García Márquez Hispano-American Short Story Prize, and, most recently, Caballo sea la noche, his first novel. He was featured in the most recent Granta Best Young Spanish Language Novelists list, where his short story appeared in the special issue of the magazine translated by Esther Allen.

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Book Published 2019-09-01 by Editorial Candaya

Comments

Such a powerful discourse, so suggestive and full of figures that the reader cannot permit herself a single distraction.

There are books that could only be written from within the rapture of consciousness. A kind of ecstasy that halts the dispensable accident that we are in order to make us dive deep into the essentialities that most radically define us. Or at least that's how I imagine Alejandro Morellón as he wrote his Caballo sea la noche: immersed in the feverish trance of a novel whose creation would result in an exhausting, nearly physical, experience.

First came the image: a white horse enveloped in the dark cloud of night. Then the idea: to provoke a reflection about identity. Caballo sea la noche is a story in two voices which narrates the relationship of a son with his mother in a house marked by absences - the father's and the older son's - and a tragic past that continues to define the present.

We encounter poetry as reflection, philosophy as understanding, prose as delirium, and the word as condemnation (and salvation). Past and future, united by a present stained with nightmares, resentments, contrition, or secrets, that end up bursting out from every corner.

A story like a flood breaking through, intimate and wild, with a weight of profundity that can just barely be discerned through language. Because Caballo sea la noche is a familial story, a story about fear, about guilt and desire, about memory and sex, and about identity and loss.

These characters, who live in this claustrophobic house from which they never emerge, are trapped in their own internal monologues, in that flow of unstoppable consciousness. Authors like Thomas Bernhard o García Márquez have given me the intuition that an uninterrupted sentence leaves a unending trace on the reader.

Dreams, guilt, affections, being and wanting to be, memory, escape, silences, evil, clairvoyance, guilt once again; Morellón passes through all these emotions, and he does so with a poetic sensibility that allows us to live, suffer, accompany, understand, and feel the backdrop of the life narrated by Alan and Rosa.

Caballo sea la noche is a poetic novel in its stylistic execution and philosophy, its existential sense, a narrative outburst told in first-person, condensed in five chapters which are five extensive paragraphs. Its construction is confined to an unlimited series of copulative phrases and subordinates, as a breathtaking and maddening way of transmitting the voices of despondent human beings who yearn to reconstruct their identities and thusly, their lives.

Have you ever read a story told in just five sentences? Caballo sea la noche is just such a book, told in such a way, in five emotional blows. Perhaps because the emotions awakened by certain events are so intense that when the author begins to narrate them, he cannot stop.

Morellón offers a nouvelle about the difficult harmonization between the voice that enunciates and the body containing the voice, about the painful truth of things, identity, and finally, about the freedom of being able to be oneself.

The cadence, risk and gamble of developing a new voice within the Spanish literary panorama makes Caballo sea la noche an incomparable proposition [...] with the risk already transmitted in the very first sentence, and which only increases with each word, each sentence, each blow of a comma subjecting us to a rhythm that is bedeviled, magical, poetic and murky.

Identity, memory, the nature of desire, guilt, a victim who does not recognize their own victimhood, all this and much more awaits you, reader, en Caballo sea la noche. Allow yourself to be carried away by the elegant and dark prose, and ride it without hesitation until its stunning ending. Perhaps you won't be able to sleep upon finishing the book, but who cares, May the Night Be a Horse.

What this novel offers readers, and is its novelty, is that the dark and painful aspects of a personal story can only be effectively transmitted if one choose the appropriate form to do so. Morellón, a writer of talent, has known how to make that evident.