It is death that compels me to write these lines. The death of a ten-year-old girl who was my daughter, though nobody knew but her mother and me. I killed her, though that is something I cannot prove.
That’s a line early in Juan José Millás‘s Only Smoke – a book that I picked up essentially cold, on the recommendation of my favourite bookseller. The bookseller remains undefeated. This book made me gasp several times, and accomplished something rare: it had a surprise ending that, in retrospect, seemed inevitable from the first sentence.
Translated from Spanish, Only Smoke tells the story of 18-year-old Carlos, who learns his estranged father (Carlos Sr.) has died in a motorcycle accident. Carlos Jr.’s mother tells him only after the funeral, claiming the final exams in his last year of high school were more important than the funeral of his absent, ‘troubled’ father. She also reveals that he’s inherited his father’s apartment, and a small sum of money.
Upon visiting the apartment, Carlos Jr. finds the note that begins with the text above. The note describes a relationship with the woman in the next apartment, and a little girl who might have been able to turn into a butterfly. After some consideration, Carlos Jr. moves into the book-filled apartment, and meets the woman next door. He finds a dog-eared copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales on the nightstand, opens it to a random page, and finds himself literally pulled into the story of Cinderella. Like, walking through the house, watching things happen in real time, attending the ball with Cinderella and her stepsisters.
That’s all I can really say about Only Smoke. It blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, between awake and dreaming, and between life and death. Carlos has encounters with several fairy tales including Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty and others. Since these are the original tales, they are grim indeed, and young Carlos is stunned by the violence and gore they contain.
While this goes on, he tries to get to the bottom of his father’s story about the dead girl and the neighbour.
It’s a short book and the story happens quickly, if a bit unevenly. The tone shifts between a kind of dreamy fairy tale to something sexually explicit without warning, and the motives of the characters are never quite clear. It doesn’t much matter, as most of my gripes are in retrospect: it’s a very short novel and by the time I really had a clear idea of what my issues were with the narrative, the story was on the final stretch.
And once it became clear where things were headed, I had my hand over my mouth in anticipation. The ending brings a ton of philosophical questions with it about free will and the nature of reality, which outweigh the qualms I had with the storytelling itself.
Only Smoke is the first book by Millás that I’ve read, but it won’t be the last. This slim volume has haunted me like a ghost since I finished it more than a week ago — I’ve gone back to read pieces of it more than once. It’s a modern fairy tale in the mold of the Brothers Grimm, and while it’s imperfect, Millás’s ambition and storytelling chops make it a memorable read.
Further Reading
Review in Washington Independent Review of Books (CONTAINS SPOILERS)
