Nicolás Poblete Pardo

Shoal Nicolás Poblete Pardo

An aimless shoal. Small, colorful fish twirling about in the confines of an aquarium with neither time nor water. The light comes up and fades, the evacuation plan is useless, the fish butt their heads against the glass, moving erratically, desperate. Nicolás Poblete in this, his fifth novel, appears as the director of this Shoal and he controls the movement of the story with delicacy and ferocity. The voices of the story emerge solitary, with encrypted narrations that weave a puzzle conceived with suspense and skill. The incidents occur out of sync, obliquely, indirectly, and the characters move in a collective rhythm, yet sadly solitary, in the setting of a city that is perceived as a large aquarium where the water is scarce. Because that is what the tamer of this shoal seems to be expressing: the solitude of living in a throng, of the harshness of being unique among the multitudes, of the great trap in which we are enclosed, with no evacuation plan possible. Homeless little fish, lost in the crowd. Broken little fish, bruised, tiny bodies damaged, healing their own wounds and those of others from a time annihilated for all and for none.