How to Disappear Completely, Mariana Enriquez

This is the story of Matías Kovac, a sixteen-year-old, apathetic, and marginalized young man who needs to break out of himself. The way to do it seems to be hidden in the diaries that Cristian, his brother, bequeaths to him when he flees to Barcelona. Kurt Cobain, Nick Cave, Suede, and Patti Smith thus form a kind of sacred text that Matías strives to decipher.

Published in 2004 after the Argentine economic crisis, it draws on the social decomposition and widespread pessimism of the time to depict the fragility of family structures and the ease with which they can be broken forever. Matías's father abandoned them motivated by evangelical pastors, his mother lies prostrate in bed knocked out by the effect of sleeping pills, and his sister, Carla, only shows herself with a balaclava that hides her face, disfigured in a suicide attempt.

Barcelona thus becomes his personal Ithaca, the only escape route, which definitively opens when a huge package of cocaine falls into his hands: thus begins the bloody delirium through the suburban, neglected, and ghostly neighborhood where he lives. The money leads him to Julián, and Julián to the punks, who hold recitals, drink boxed wine, and wear torn fishnet stockings. Matías's will to escape ties him more to his family drama, but in the course of the novel, other ways of inhabiting a world that seems to be constantly degrading are revealed little by little. "I know I can be different, I don't want to die like this," he tells himself over and over again. Can all this darkness lead to a sunnier place?