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Fiction

Erros e Tánatos

By Gonzalo Navaza

About this book

Erros e Tánatos is a set of ten short stories in which Gonzalo Navaza shows great skills in managing narrative techniques using short, clear, direct and humorous prose that captivates readers with its capacity for irony, mystery and surprise.

Erros e Tánatos is a wonderful book of total narrative clarity that captivates the reader with its good stories, stories and events that grow and create the narrative tension that comes to a surprising end, an end that explores the territories of Thanatos due to the Erros (mistakes) of fate.

Using a classical way of narrating, Gonzalo Navaza has written a book that entertains and seduces, a book of an efficient narrator and a remarkable work. This edition is published in a new format and with a new look, and it has been revised by the author to commemorate its tenth edition since 1996. This group of short-stories by Gonzalo Navaza has become one of the classics in Galician contemporary writing.

Book fragment

—That guy you see over there –Moreiras was saying spreading a newspaper clipping from a German newspaper on the table– is Emiliano Zingarelli, an Italian I met in Switzerland, crossing the Alps.

It was a long and thin stripe, worn on the bends. On the right margin, written in red ink and with the careless handwriting of Moreiras himself, one could read with difficulty the date and the name of the newspaper, Die Zeitung, Zurich. In a large picture an aristocratic manor with porch and white columns could be seen. In a smaller picture there was the portrait of a man in his early thirties.

—I met him at the beginning of 85 –he went on saying–. It was a good time for me then.

My sister Lucía was then in some kind of affair with Rafae Vaz, when Rafael Vaz was still not that important in Galician Television and every now and then I used to get assignments as production assistant while recording outdoors. In this particular occasion we had been to the Swiss Ticino, near Lugano, recording some private painting collection that, rumour had it, was going to be sold, rented or leased to the Spanish state. We finished the work in two very intense days, far before what we had scheduled and when others caught the plane back I decided to stay for a few days as a tourist.