In a literary panorama saturated with easily consumed stories, back to the point, by José Alemany Puig, emerges as a demanding, lucid and deeply moral work. Third volume of the cycle Chronicles of Sakhará, this novel confirms that it is still possible to narrate collective memory from formal intelligence and ethical intensity. With a style that refers to the great explorers of narrative language—Rafael Chirbes, Juan Benet or Almudena Grandes—, Alemany constructs a fiction where the truth is not proclaimed: it is investigated.

   The novel alternates three narrative registers: the handwritten notebooks of Colliure's father and grandfather, and an external voice that, from the right distance, organizes the fragments. This polyphonic game does not seek structural boasts, but rather to test the different versions of the story. In back to the point, each testimony is confronted with another, and each private memory is measured against the collective one. Thus, truth becomes a process, not a dogma.

   The plot is set in a small provincial town, where José Colliure returns to earn a living as a taxi driver after rejecting the favors of the Franco regime. In local cafes and casinos, his public opposition brings him face to face with old friends, suspicion, and, ultimately, isolation. Their resistance is neither heroic nor pamphleteering: it is civil, everyday, articulated in gestures and silences. Much of the strength of the novel lies in that moral outlook without rhetoric.

   A plot of intrigue is superimposed on this realistic basis. The murder of Rosendo Palacios and the investigations of Sergeant Calatayud introduce a crime novel dimension that functions as an ethical engine: each crime is a question about responsibility. The investigation continually displaces the hypotheses—political revenge or amorous passion? —and, with this, exposes the mechanisms of manipulated truth. What seems like a “solved case” is revealed to be a calculated staging by Santiago Palau, son of the former Republican mayor who was executed: a man who, in his desire for justice, ends up building a theater of deception.

   In the final fragment, the reader witnesses the outcome of this narrative machinery: the bodies, the letters, the reports, the rains and the silences are linked together with almost forensic precision. When the truth finally emerges, it is too late. Clarity comes with the cessation of the rain, under a starry sky that more than illuminates, sentences.

   Nothing in Alemany's writing is incidental. His prose, dense but breathable, is made of long, meticulous sentences that combine elegance with accuracy. The spaces—the “La Linterna” casino, the marsh, the flooded streets—act as witnesses of consciousness. The persistent rain, which soaks the story from beginning to end, is a metaphor for a Spain that has not yet dried its wounds. The novel demonstrates that style can be a form of ethics: writing accurately is also resisting lies.

   back to the point It is also a novel of crossed inheritances. Three generations – grandfather, father and son – narrate, remember and correct the past. This choral structure transforms the family saga into a mirror of the country's history: each voice rewrites the previous one, and in that rereading the possibility of a shared truth is articulated. Memory, here, is not an accumulation of memories, but an act of responsibility.

   Far from nostalgic reconstructions or speeches of revenge, Alemany proposes a literature that observes and reasons. The presence of diaries, letters and confessions is not an aesthetic resource, but a declaration of principles: if society is built on silences, literature must be the place where those silences are broken. As Paul Ricœur points out, remembering is also interpreting; and this novel moves right in that territory where memory becomes knowledge.

   In times of polarization and easy stories, back to the point He defends that memory continues to be a space of intelligence. Rereading the postwar period does not imply opening old wounds, but rather learning to look at them without fear. Alemany Puig turns narrative into a moral laboratory: a place where the truth is sought with the rigor of the historian, the sensitivity of the poet and the patience of the judge.

   In short, back to the point It not only continues a literary saga; vindicates a tradition: that of writers who understand that narrating is not indoctrinating, but thinking. And in that commitment to memory as a form of lucidity, José Alemany Puig writes one of the most solid and necessary novels on the current Spanish scene.

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Where to find Back to the point

The printed edition of back to the point has its own ISBN 9788409855391 and international distribution through Ingram. The permanent editorial profile of Alba Longa It brings together bibliographic data and links of international availability. You can also consult the file of José Alemany Puig and the joint presentation of Chronicles of Sakhará.

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