Winner of the MARIO VARGAS LLOSA V BIENNIAL NOVEL PRIZE, 2023

Mario Vargas Llosa says "I have just read this novel by the Mexican writer David Toscana, which won the Biennial Novel Prize that bears my name, held in Guadalajara, and I think it is one of the most original texts published in recent years".
"What is at stake in this remarkable text is humour. A strange and incandescent humour".
"One of the original aspects of this book is that game by which, in the depths of the tragedies that the characters experience, there is always a light to which they can cling",
"I think David Toscana has written one of the best novels in the language". La Nación, article by Mario Vargas Llosa

Written with the will to believe that imagination and desire are powerful forces for transforming reality, The Weight to Live on Earth puts us in front of an immense frieze of possibilities: life changes as we read, the author proposes, and this is how this group of characters turn the city of Monterrey into every possible scenario from Tsarist Russia to Soviet Russia, and a canteen will be a space station, an orange orchard will be a dacha, the Santa Catarina River will be the Neva, and an abandoned cable car will be the take-off platform.

Sinopsis

The news of the death of three Soviet cosmonauts on their return to Earth after 23 days on the Sailyut space station is the trigger for the delirious journey that Nikolai is about to embark on. Driven by his passion for reading, he changes his name to Nikolai Nikolayevich Pseldonov and his everyday life in the early 1970s in northern Mexico becomes a frieze that combines all the times and spaces of Russian literature: from Tolstoy to Bulgakov, from Chekhov to Akhmatova. Nicholas and his wife, along with a handful of strangers who join them along the way, fervently recreate scenes, conversations and stories from a wide range of novels, short stories and plays, but which, unlike the knights imitated by Don Quixote, star anti-heroes. Dozens or hundreds of stories that help us to piece together their own history and to sense their desolation in the face of a world in which they do not fit, a world they can only face with their imagination. Because, as the protagonist of The weight to live o earth says, “Life is the only infinite thing that has an end”.

WHAT HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT THE AUTHOR’S WORK
“Una obra que en España emparentaría de modo claro con el mejor Luis Landero, puesto que se sustenta en un mismo aliento o eje: el hiato entre realidad e irrealidad y el afán de los hombres por no resignarse a lo que son sin haber, al menos, intentado probar la suerte de lo que podrían ser; en suma: la redención en la búsqueda de lo imposible.” Ernesto Calabuig, El Cultural, El Mundo.
“El humor, y en específico el negro, en las novelas de Toscana es legendario (…) logra unir la gran tradición de la picaresca en español con el universo metafísico de otro checo, Franz Kafka, para imponer un nuevo adjetivo atmosférico a la literatura mexicana: toscaniano o toscanesco.” Juan José de Ávila, El Confabulario, El Universal.