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Fiction

Orixe

By Séchu Sende

About this book

This is a story of stories in which freedom and social awareness are vindicated as fundamental values of human beings.

Séchu Sende was a well-known poet when he was awarded the Premio Blanco Amor for his novel Orixe. This is a direct and innovative novel, funny but committed to its time. The novel recalls how Mario Negro, who suffers from terrible vertigo, cannot open his eyes and thus enters the imaginative world of Laura Lobo, his night nurse. The liberating power of imagination, the energy of love and its capacity to overcome loneliness are the strengths the nurse uses to rescue Mario Negro from his misery. Séchu Sende activates the creative element in each reader with writing that is both accessible and innovative.

Orixe includes action and emotion, and the novel focuses from the beginning on the individual but in the end encompasses a whole nation under a dictatorship.

Book fragment

Mario Negro woke up in the hospital. He had been found lying on a beach, unconscious, and for two days he did not open his eyes. When he did, he had to close them immediately -- everything was spinning. Vertigo, brutal and painful vertigo, was waiting outside his eyelids.

With closed eyes, he explained to the neurologist Daniel Maside that he was looking at the see when suddenly he felt a terrible and sudden shiver, as if a storm was coming and entering his whole body.

The night shift nurse was called Laura, and she was more or less his age and started working in the hospital a few weeks before. She sometimes used to tell him, “Hey, come on, open your eyes and look into mine.” He tried but it was not possible -- if he kept his eyes open for more than a second, Laura started spinning around him, along with the rest of the room.