Certain stories are read as if crossing a street, hurriedly and anxiously, fearing being run over by the plot. Nine Fictions (Bokeh, 2025), by Carlos Ávila Villamar, on the other hand, reads like mapping a territory that does not yet exist. More than a simple collection of stories, the book is configured as a system of textual exploration: from its syntactic discourse to its theological inquiry and constant meta-narrative investigation.
The story that opens the volume, “Los profetas” (The Prophets), reveals the programmatic nature of the whole. That is, it questions the sources of meaning in a landscape where authority has been radically dismantled. Alejandro, its protagonist, is determined to invent a religion to guide his orphaned nephews, not out of a burst of faith, but out of cold logic: “He then had an idea. In order to provide a perfect education that the nihilism of reason would never achieve… he would teach the children to believe in God, and let them discover for themselves that he did not exist.” What Alejandro devises, far from being a religious doctrine in the strict sense, reveals itself to be a moral hypothesis equipped with a self-annihilating mechanism, a dogmatic construct designed for its own dissolution. Is this not an essentially modern narrative form?
The way in which the prose itself submits to this guiding principle described above is remarkable. The language oscillates, thickens, fractures. Each sentence traces a deliberate, almost geometric curve on an invisible plane of construction. Ávila writes with the meticulousness of someone restoring a fossil, knowing that he is manipulating the very matter of time and meaning.
As the story progresses, Alejandro ceases to be the author of his doctrine and becomes its first exegete. Samanta, his niece, transmutes religion into ritual and, in turn, ritual into community practice: “The spread of the doctrine began as a game… The transcription of the stories did not even imply understanding.” The original fiction becomes sacred text; this, in turn, is transmuted into a performative object. The entire community abandons itself to meditation, memorizes parables written in coffee, and venerates aesthetics as if it embodied the ultimate metaphysics.
There are echoes of Joyce here, not so much in tone, sonority, or lexicon, as in the underlying architecture. We are faced with a closed system that generates meaning from the internal recirculation of its elements. When Saúl, one of the children, falls ill, his supposed miraculous recovery does not revive faith, but rather subjects it to profound questioning: “God is waiting for us on the other side of the river,” he said. I don’t care if they wait for me if I’m not going to be there, Saul replied in a dying voice, God will take my hand when I no longer have a face.” Religion, from this perspective, does not offer comfort; rather, it reveals itself as a complex interface.
Each story in Nine Fictions operates as a sounding board where combinations of language and truths are rehearsed. In “Dissection of the Unthinkable Event,” for example, causality is suspended, and events are not ordered by consequences but by narrative possibilities. The structures seem inevitable, but the meanings that inhabit them are interchangeable.
But let’s return to “Los profetas,” which deserves to be read as a short novel embalmed within a collection. The scene in which Alejandro observes the corpse that the crowd believes will resurrect—a scene that should seem absurd but is deeply moving—marks the culmination and collapse of his narrative project: “The corpse was smiling… Samanta tried to get in between. Don’t touch it, she said, or God will be very angry.” What he conceived as pedagogy ends up operating as a founding myth. The writer becomes an apostate of his own fiction.
From a strictly technical perspective, Ávila Villamar’s syntactic skill deserves special consideration. His prose, far from seeking melodic or transparent fluidity, seems to be articulated from an architectural principle. Each sentence condenses into a miniature a barely hinted philosophical thesis, a thought in its embryonic state: “The separation between play and reality… was perhaps not so far from the separation between religious myth… and reality.” This idea—that play could be an unfinished rehearsal of reality, and religion, in turn, a failed rehearsal of play—condenses, I believe, the profound project of the book.
In other authors, such devices could be perceived as artificial, even as a veiled form of pretentiousness. But here a different density is at work. Nine Fictions does not set out to prove the existence or non-existence of God; its aim is to show that language, even when its ultimate referent is null or ungraspable, generates tangible consequences in the realm of the real. That which is invented through words acquires the power to shape the physical world. “If time is infinite, there is infinite time in the company of God before our birth and there is infinite time after our death. Dying today will not give you more time in the company of God than dying in a hundred years.” This sentence, uttered by a girl who, almost by accident, starts a sect, distills a philosophical acuity more penetrating than any pseudo-Einsteinian treatise on the nature of time.
Towards the end, Alejandro, the demiurge, seems to sense the vast magnitude of his deviation, of his foundational error: “Two of the three brothers have already deserted,” Alejandro said to himself, like the narrator of one of his sacred stories. The author has been displaced; the text has gained radical autonomy. What else could a writer want?
The rest of the stories unfold as thematic and formal variations on the same core concern: how does fiction sustain itself once the belief that underpinned it has dissipated? “Dodos contra moas” proposes a kind of metaphorical zoology of spiritual extinction, tinged with an irony that evokes Darwinism: survival does not favor the fittest, but rather those who best fabricate their own disappearance. “Fósiles,” on the other hand, is built from an eminently sedimentary texture, accumulating layers of memory and language until the contours between personal and collective archaeology are blurred. Its prose, here more opaque and with an almost liturgical cadence, seems to harbor an intrinsic doubt about the power of its own signs.
“El imitador” (The Imitator) delves into a reflection on the incessant desire for authenticity in a world saturated with replicas. Its protagonist does not so much pursue his own identity as a copy that will free him from the weight of himself. “Salamander Dreams” and ‘Foxes’ revisit the peculiar moral fauna that populates the book to explore the blurred boundaries between pure instinct and conscious will, between inherited guilt and an ever-uncertain autonomy. ‘Midnight Sun’ adopts a deliberately photophobic style, as if shying away from the blinding light of its own conceptual brilliance. Finally, “La intuición de la caída” does not close the volume with a clear resolution, but with a slow-moving question suspended in the air: what happens when even the act of falling loses its inherent direction? What persists is not the descent, but its ultimate simulacrum, a gravity that paradoxically lacks weight.
It is said that James Joyce, when asked repeatedly about the difficulty of Finnegans Wake, replied with a knowing smile: “Yes, but that’s because life is too.” In Nine Fictions, Ávila Villamar seems to adhere to a similar principle: intrinsic difficulty is not a demerit, but a radical form of fidelity to the complexity of reality. Like the author of Ulysses, who forged a text designed to transform anyone who ventured to read it, Ávila proposes a fiction that only activates, that only comes to life when the reader inhabits it from a position of heresy, with the skeptical doubt and fervor of a believer at the same time.
In an age where texts designed for instant comprehension, to be consumed at first glance, abound, Nine Fictions resists being simply read; it invites you to inhabit it. And in that inhabiting, sometimes arduous, sometimes harsh, an uncomfortable but liberating truth is revealed: that reading itself constitutes, in its deepest essence, a form of devotion. But not a devotion to the author or to a pre-established truth, but to the very act of reading as a perpetual event in which the world is invented.
