The Trail of the Fire that Recedes

The first chapters of this book , which won the National Critics Prize, are about «the crisis facing the protagonist», who the author names with the letter A. He is a middle-aged man that, despite looking like one of life’s natural winners, is convinced that he has wasted his talents in search of material security. But there is another protagonist: B, a kind of grotesque double of A. One and the other find themselves on each side of the mirror, without ever being sure who is a reflection of whom. Thirty years after its first edition, the recovery of The Trail of the Fire that Recedes, with a prologue by Ignacio Echevarría, is revealed as an amazing novel that conserves intact the dynamite of its searing humor and its capacity to get underneath the reader’s skin.

«Goytisolo reverses Proust: it is no longer life that is transformed into literature, but literature that explains the world» (Rafael Conte, El País).

«Pages with a rigorous intelligence of ambitious elaboration, delicate nostalgia and splendid sarcasm. In definitive, a disconcerting, amazing and extraordinary novel» (J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia).