“It is a great novel.”

“Colossal novel [...] Pron’s ability to fabulate is astonishing.”

“Pron opens our eyes when the rest of us would prefer to close them and keep them closed.”

“It would seem that Pron writes in a trance, delivered to the fountain of imagination and the remix of what he
has read, riding the machinery of the story or the wave of the sentence.”

“His prose is inventive and poetic.”

“Patricio Pron’s writing has a unique sound.”

“He carries with him that determination to resist that Lezama Lima always admired, he is capable of looking with the same humanity as Sebald, the intelligence of Félix de Azúa and the sense of humor of Dylan.”

“Pron’s novel advocates that writing is a way of knowing the world, because writing is presided by a greater intensity than reality, and it is there that the secret nature of the things of this world manifests itself. A secret characterized by indeterminacy and flight, doubleness and ghosts. The result is brutal, but liberating.”

“Non-obvious symbolisms, suggestions, apparent digressions that are nevertheless continuity or development, if not the precise centre of what was meant to be said. Pron is one of the most conscientious and brilliant narrators on our scene.”

“An excellent novel —it must be stated unequivocally—published after memorable pieces such as My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain.”

“Patricio Pron is still engaged in a research between literary and philosophical that becomes a demanding writing in which he searches for the exact word that captures all the nuances of what he wants to say. And what he wants to say can now be found in The Secret Nature of The Things of This World.”

“In The Secret Nature of the Things of This World it seems that things are the beings who in turn endow things with nature (meaning?). The two stories, Olivia and Edward, intersect more in the intimate than in the physical, and in reading how their lives are told the senses (here, yes) of the story are superimposed and ordered. As Pron himself stated at the presentation of his novel at the Llibreria Finestres: ‘the salvific power of literature lies in the fact that it allows us to reconstruct lost meaning.’”

“Pron, like the Great Absent One who is one of the main protagonists of his novel, paints portraits of time, here he writes portraits that speak to us ‘of the action of time on things’ and on ourselves.”

“Patricio Pron is the kind of writer for whom writing is a challenge to forms, fleeing from conformism and avoiding reiteration. The Secret Nature of The Things of This World, his new narrative work, is proof of all this.”

“A prolific author, Pron always places literature in a context of crisis and possibilities, in the end of an era and, therefore, in a beginning - the edge of a coin, the hinge - where it will be necessary to question the possibilities of fiction as a useful tool for unravelling the world.”

“The Secret Nature of The Things of This World is not in one place, as if we were to say, hidden in the basement of Garay Street. It is in many basements and many terraces. In cheap hotel rooms, in shared flats, in construction sites, in car parks, in art galleries, in almost deserted bars, in theaters. But none of these places is enough to show it all. Even so, the enormous frieze of fictions that Patricio Pron constructs in this book tries: it unfolds in all its magnitude only to say that in this great puzzle the pieces don’t fit together.”

“Excellent.”

“Once again, this cosmopolitan Argentinean shows us once again that it is possible to continue being an original writer today, outside fashions, conventions, clichés, prizes and various trifles.”

“Pron speaks through these two characters of the hunger for freedom and at the same time of the urgency of consolation.”

“Like Scheherazade, Pron—the one with the long titles like the names of the new Argentinean rock bands—offers a perennial adventure in the face of what we already know to be terminal. Perhaps this finitude [...] conclusively summarizes the most secret possible nature, which the forest itself has not revealed, among the many incomprehensible things of this world.”

“A magnetic text, with fragments that are absolutely absorbing for the reader when it comes to explaining or proposing certain questions related to creation itself, authentic literary shudders, flashes of lightning and a fascinating overall result.”