Nosotros caminamos en sueños
Patricio Pron

FICTION | 2014 | 160 pages

A bomb is suspended mid-air and refuses to drop. Exhausted and starving soldiers gaze skyward and wonder if all wars are like this. They don’t know who the enemy is or where he is, but they continue to sleep walk, fighting for a stretch of land that belongs to no one, defending a country floating on a subsoil of misery and corruption.

There’s nothing normal or predictable in WE WALK IN DREAMS, the revised and expanded version of the novel in which Patricio Pron claimed that it is “not what really happened or could have happened, but rather what effectively happened, however only in the childhood imagination” of the author, who was six years old when war broke out between Argentina and Great Britain. WE WALK IN DREAMS speaks of that confrontation, but the true topic of this comical novel is what happens when one kills in the name of nationalism and what happens when common sense gives way to cowardice and stupidity disguised as patriotism. Pron's vision satirizes all wars. It is a story (simultaneously inhabited by spirits akin to Samuel Beckett, César Aira, Martin Amis and Fogwill) that takes only the reader as prisoner.

RIGHTS: spanish LITERATURA RANDOM HOUSE

“The narrator does not play with the auto-fiction that Javier Cercas used so well in Soldados de Salamina, nor Bolaño’s monstrously long lists in 2666. On the contrary, his strategy is more complex and simpler: it immerses the reader directly into a suffocating exercise of the suppression of reality and logic.”
— Luis Enrique Forero, Revista Vísperas