Cómo desaparecer completamente

This is the story of Matías Kovac, a listless and marginalized sixteen-year-old who needs to escape his own limitations. The path to this escape seems to be hidden in the diaries his brother, Cristian, leaves him when he flees to Barcelona. Kurt Cobain, Nick Cave, Suede, and Patti Smith thus form a kind of sacred text that Matías is determined to decipher. Published in 2004, after the Argentine economic crisis, the book uses the social decay and widespread pessimism of the time to depict the fragility of family structures and how easily they can be broken forever. Matías's father abandoned them, influenced by evangelical pastors; his mother lies bedridden, unconscious from the effects of sleeping pills; and his sister, Carla, is only ever seen wearing a balaclava that conceals her face, disfigured in a suicide attempt. Barcelona thus becomes his own personal Ithaca, his only escape route, which opens definitively when a huge package of cocaine falls into his hands: then begins his bloody delirium through the neglected, ghostly suburban neighborhood where he lives. The money leads him to Julián, and Julián to the punks, who put on concerts, drink boxed wine, and wear fishnet stockings. Matías's desire to escape binds him even more tightly to his family drama, but as the novel unfolds, other ways of inhabiting a world that seems to be constantly deteriorating are gradually revealed. "I know I can be different, I don't want to die like this," he tells himself again and again. Can all this darkness lead to some sunnier place?