God is dead. Ron Currie Jr. (Viking, 2007)

It's not easy to describe the first novel by the American Ron Currie. Perhaps that is why, at least in the Spanish edition that once came to my hands, the commentary by the band places at the beginning of the story something that does not happen until the fifth chapter. We are talking about a book with nine chapters. That clumsiness is the biggest mistake I find in my novelist, God is dead. Otherwise, I highly recommend it.

The first episode brings us to a refugee camp in Sudan. There are two surprising things going on: on the one hand, Colin Powell's racial awareness wakes up. On the other hand, God, who has come to visit the Earth incarnated in a woman of the Dinka lineage, dies, but not in the philosophical sense proposed by Nietzsche, but in the physical sense. Moribundo. Cease to exist. However, we will not know this until the fifth chapter, through the statements of one of the dogs that have devoured the body of the woman's god to a journalist. If in the back cover of the book they quote the dog, it is not such a grave sin that I also practice the spoil.

All the other passages of the novel have the same surreal atmosphere. Most of them have no relationship with each other, and in the case of those who have it, this relationship is simple. Dystopian stories that immerse us in an increasingly suffocating atmosphere present us with a chaotic world in which it has really realized that God does not exist. But it is not going to be clear to us, not to me, whether the author has wanted to assert the advantages of religious faith, or, on the contrary, to denounce the weakness of humanity that cannot walk on its own without the crutches of that faith. The introduction of all chapters with a quote from the Bible has been considered by some critics as a sample of the author's religiosity, but it is not known.