Vidas perpendiculares

Jerónimo Rodríguez Loera is, in appearance, a normal Mexican child, just like any other. But he also happens to be a monster. Jerónimo remembers every cycle of his reincarnations in detail and, with that, all human behaviour. Remembering  his past lives, Jerónimo introduces the reader to an eternal game that involves many  participants. Once the bridges have been firmly placed across the model of this novel-river, Vidas perpendiculares provides a different novelistic formulation: a quantum formula, where diverse times and spaces exist simultaneously. Only like this can the cavalry charge of a Germanic Cesar co-exist with the story of a Mexican gardener, the Neapolitan lover of  Francisco de Quevedo and the Asturian agitator in Buenos Aires, the camel trains on the Mongolian steppes, the muralist who fails because of his extreme politics, Pablo de Tarso and the puppies of a Homo sapiens programmed to impose his DNA forcefully. And through this collision of realities  a series of mysteries emerge: How did a young Turk, a weaver of carpets destined to be a Sanhedrin, invent modernity? How is that the greatest erotic poet was also the most disagreeable man of his time? How did we perceive the world before we had the power of speech? 

"The narrative strategy of this brilliant author reaches a climax in pages that are filled with an irresistible, volcanic power; a section where the central protagonist  has lost, or still has not achieved, his identity within the herd of the aurora of time... the original tribe who ran on the wolfs' steppes, half man, half animal, following their instincts and ferociously defending their leader, the only one of them who admits imitation" (Carlos Fuentes, El País).

"Enrigue is a marvellous writer, always on the look out for a felicitous sentence, intelligent and with a highly subtle sense of humour" (Edmundo Paz Soldán, Letras Libres).

"Like an astute chess player, the author moves through time, stopping when he discovers the emblematic points of a character with an uncommon personality" (Élmer Mendoza, El Universal).

"A novel as intense and original as its surprising" (Tomás Ruibal, El Día de Toledo).

"A book written with daring brilliance" (Notodolibros.com).

"Few writers with such fine prose know how to avoid reflection and intellectual symmetry to instead focus on narrative exploits" (Oliverio Coelho).

"In command of a sharp soul and a quick-witted narrative intelligence,  Enrigue narrates in a non-linear fashion stories that, in advancing, always return to their source"  (Martín Schifino, Revista de Libros).