En todo hay una grieta y por ella entra la luz
Patricio Pron

FICTION | 2026 | ~300 pages

A shapeshifting novel that is part essay, part biography, and part philosophical treatise that questions how we can write and live today in the midst of societal collapse

In a dark New York that is still reeling from the pandemic and in the shadow of Trump's new authoritarianism, an author is commissioned to write a biography of Benjamin Fondane: a French poet and filmmaker of Romanian origin, a witness to Parisian surrealism, and the creator of a cursed film in Buenos Aires who was ultimately murdered in Auschwitz. But the project is quickly interrupted: illness, grief, and a devastating event open a rift that allows the writer's family's past, the disappearance of a landscape, the ruins of the century, and the echoes of a fox whose gaze revealed a gift to his immigrant grandfather in Argentina to seep in. En todo hay una grieta y por ella entra la luz is a hybrid novel, halfway between an essay, an autobiography, an apocryphal biography, and a philosophical treatise—a text traversed by notes that expand upon it and a text that questions how we should live and write today in the midst of collapse. It also acts as an elegy for a crumbling world: a physical world, but also a symbolic and moral one. And it is an ambitious, desperate, necessary attempt to restore meaning to this world through imagination, artistic creation, and attention, as Simone Weil advocated for. 

A meditation on finitude, ecological mourning, visible and invisible violence, art as resistance, and the possibility of hope. With echoes of W. G. Sebald, Sigrid Nunez, Zadie Smith, Annie Dillard, and Rachel Cusk, this book confirms Patricio Pron as one of the most unique and daring narrators of his generation: radical, elegant, fierce, and melancholic. A writer who transforms desolation into vivid thought and narrative into luminously memorable emotions.

RIGHTS: spanish ANAGRAMA

“Pron’s deliberately difficult books are books that resist being written, that ultimately prevail, and they emerge with a force as great as their apparent naturalness. And while we are used to reading books with a lot of heart that still lack soul, well-intentioned projects without true literary substance, the opposite is true of Pron’s books—they are surrounded by a kind of strange coldness that is later completely dispelled, an air that is foreign and almost prickly that ends up warming up. The fire in his new novel is, as always, in the tone, but also in the subject matter: something like the collective damage stemming from a flood of individual suffering. The post-pandemic spirit, climate confusion, desperate migrations, Trump not as a symptom but as a symbol, or the things that were once good and that we needed but have now been subjected to all sorts of corruption, plundering, and cheapening—these things all give an imprecise form to a novel built on digressions. And that structure, backed by footnotes, makes it, I suppose, difficult to read on an electronic device, which would be enough for me to like it. The New York portrayed here (“it’s not well lit,” “it’s not exactly a place, but a speed”…) is very reminiscent of Teju Cole’s in Open City: it’s that same chant, that hallucinatory and sublime prose that serves so well as a soundtrack to our inert time, as full of possibilities as it is of fear, grief, and frustration”
— Juan Marqués, El Mundo
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