Fiction
September 2023
Those who listen
by Diego SÁNCHEZ AGUILAR
Sinopsis : The closing ceremony of the Future Summit has an unexpected ending that puts the G7 presidents in an awkward position. While their advisors try to find out who has caused this problem and how to solve it, scenes from the lives of characters united by one fact are interspersed: they all hear a strange noise, the origin of which they cannot determine. This sound has side effects that will make them rethink their lives and their ethical convictions in a world that seems to be crumbling by the minute. When the future seems like a territory populated by ghosts, Diego Sánchez Aguilar explores, in Those who listen, all the forms of anxiety and fear that define contemporary society. And it will be difficult to emerge unscathed from his relentless enquiry. In Those who listen, Diego Sánchez Aguilar explores all the forms of Anxiety and Fear that define our contemporary society. “A thoughtful novel that avoids sermons: the best way to be a political novel” José María Pozuelo Yvancos . A novel that reminds us Thomas Pinchon, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and the Bulgarian Guéorgui Gospodínov. And something to do as well with Vivir abajo by Gustavo Faverón. The second novel by Murcian writer Diego Sánchez Aguilar (first one, Factsbook) is an extensive book with a deep political, contemporary and current commitment. A novel about anxiety, family, care, madness, the planet, capitalism and language. It is also a novel about language, about the way in which language constructs the world and, above all, about what future is possible, thinkable or imaginable within the horizon of meanings of a language dominated by the ideology of marketing and economic profit and infinite growth. Diego Sánchez Aguilar shows, with humour and precision, how this language determines common sense, and defines what is reasonable and what is madness.
