‘The Desired Effect’, by Guillermo Alonso: How an Orphan Survives in a World of Cynics | Babelia

How does an orphan survive among the cynics? What becomes a clean look if it is clouded by the reflection of selfish and sordid people, responsible for unhealthy relationships? This dilemma is what looms The desired effect (Seix Barral), the latest novel by Guillermo Alonso (Pontevedra, 1982). After the volume of short stories Tongue between teeth (Círculo de Tiza, 2023) and novels Long live the right men (children free, 2019) e Private displays of affection (Paripé Books, 2021), the writer and web editor of ICON magazine modernizes the picaresque by polishing his style allergic to moral hierarchies. And it does so by infiltrating without superiority and with a lot of empathy into a carnival of characters who aspire to shine while rotting inside. Beings so eager for hedonism and privilege that their drive will move the reader from tenderness to horror amid laughter that will freeze when they understand that our nervous laughter is a direct ticket to the little room of hell.

In this non-linear fiction that takes place between time jumps between Madrid and an idyllic Greek island, Gaspar is 19 years old and left alone in life after the death of his mother, a woman as eccentric as she is fascinating who was broken inside in the past. The protagonist’s existence will be defined by that venerated woman who raised him without a father in sight between drunkenness and fleeting lovers in the shared room of a filthy hotel where Gaspar behaved like a boy throughout since he was conscious. Convinced that he must avenge his mother’s death, the young man will begin to define his identity beyond the orphanage by serving the rich. First he will work for Pandora, a widow obsessed with appearances and performance of happiness, dedicated to offering countless parties in the most rancid Madrid, the one where the trees boast the best greenery “as if nature sent its best grains of pollen to sprout where the old money is”. Then he will travel to the Cyclades to take care of the Ottavianos, a mysterious super-rich couple left disfigured following an accident and whose contract prohibits him from asking questions. In that villa with the beach, a golden cage where Gaspare will come to wonder if he will be forbidden to bathe in the sea as workers are expected not to bathe in the pool, it will be there that all the enigmas he has carried with him since he was a child will be solved. What does an orphan become when he collides with the world of those who treat him like a commodity?

while reading The desired effect It should not go unnoticed that its author, also winner of the Ondas Prize for podcasts colloquial Arsenic caviar which he hosts together with the writer and journalist Beatriz Serrano, has for years been a chronicler of aspirations and trends in an increasingly melancholic world. It is in Gaspare’s apparently subordinate gaze that the decadence in the imposed opulence of those who define good taste becomes explicit. That young man “expert in being invisible” who lives his wandering life with a pragmatic resignation but open to the pleasures of life; That born survivor who will also face violence in his journey of sexual initiation will become a thief without a shred of fool who will be able to anticipate every move of those who want to truncate his destiny. Gaspar will already think about it in one of the first rich people’s parties he sees and which so well defines the drifts of our time, the one in which, regardless of birth, he has equally lost us: “If at the beginning the desire to appear virtuous was infected in everyone, in the end the relief of appearing ridiculous was infected”.