Paradise Burns
A young man dies at twenty-four, and the people who loved him each keep a different piece of his life.
Novel · 160 pages · Paperback · 2026 · FSG Originals
The angle of a face
A bracelet torn from a national flag, a postcard with no address on it. Both hang above Líton’s hospice bed. His mother adds a plastic rosary without a word. Rita, the friend who nurses him to the end, asks why he hung it there. Líton says a nun did. The wall fills with the evidence of a life lived in separate rooms.
Pol Guasch opens Paradise Burns with Líton, dead at twenty-four, describing his own coffin. The rest of the novel rebuilds that life through changing narrators, none of whom saw all of it.
In her barely punctuated childhood diary, Rita files what she feels for Lena, the baker’s daughter, under friendship. Rita’s split from Líton is in future tense. It is settled before it happens. There, Líton goes through their photographs and finds none from the Colony, where Rita’s family works the mine. In one from the greenhouse he finds part of his own face. He wonders which angle of it he lost when Rita stopped looking at him.
The night Rita and Líton meet ends in a fire, with ash where the house stood. The radio reports the drought flatly. It reports a new illness among young men the same way. In the Service, where Líton is a conscript, a quiet boy vanishes from the morning line. Rumour speaks of punishment for forbidden desire. Líton and René, the librarian, start meeting in the latrines. Guasch writes that sex in full, the dirt of the place included. The next bulletin files it under filth. René disappears after the medical examinations, and nobody explains either absence.
Líton dies in sentences the reader has met before. In the burning forest he thinks he sees René among the embers, his own name suddenly strange. The fire chapter runs as one paragraph whose sentences shorten as his breathing fails, until the last word is his grip on a charred branch. The hospice chapter repeats that passage almost line by line, with Rita now in René's place and the gulp of cold water from the fire returning as a gulp of blood. It is the novel's most effective structural decision: the repetition brings environmental catastrophe and bodily decline into formal contact without making one the cause of the other. Among his last words are Rita's name, his own and René's.
Strobe light, cutting the dancers into scraps of night and day. The dance at the party where Rita and Líton meet comes round nearly intact in the greenhouse and in a city club, and where the hospice repeat changes who sits at Líton's side and what he swallows, these change nothing that matters. The latrine scenes need no gloss, and Guasch closes them anyway on a general statement about love crumbling once others begin to listen, after the scene has shown as much.
Two voices tell the funeral, Líton’s mother and Lena, who stayed in the town. Each voice breaks off mid-sentence. The other finishes it. The mother has told the priest to put the death down to Líton’s lungs and leave his blood out of it. Lena remembers a cousin who wasted the same way and was buried just as quietly. Every symptom and bulletin points to AIDS. The book leaves the illness unnamed. In the mother’s instruction, that silence finds an author. Both women look for Rita. Neither reaches her before she is gone.
Rita drives to the lake where she last sat with Fèlix, her boyfriend then. It is a dry crater. Dead trees cover the basin. She thinks they may still be the trees they were. Then she wonders whether anyone will remember her and Líton.
Advance reader copy provided by FSG Originals