Human relationships always mean innumerable edges; due to their nature, situations can be reached that, due to their meaning, lead to leaving a mark within the spirit of those who live them intensely and immensely. In this story, the author, Alejandra Gotóo, guides us with her magnificent pen and subtly, delves into the life of its two protagonists, Isadore and Josué, in the bond that unites them and, at the same time, separates them.
Isadore or absolute love is a story full of nuances, light and dark about what happens within a marriage, its comings, and goings. However, it is not an ordinary story; the fragmentation of the chapters, and the letters, give a feeling of looking at the scenes vividly. It can be somewhat distressing due to the impossibility of doing and being only a spectator of the scenes created by the author.
Gotóo breaks down emotions by making a word puzzle, where each piece fits and illuminates the described environment. The secondary characters are pieces that, with their presence, give an even greater touch of drama and, sometimes, crudeness. Gotóo's writing in this work is minimalist, with details that build a novel to be thought and felt. Everything is narrated in such a way that the ending is surprising; I have found myself rethinking it several times.
The characters that inhabit this imaginary place are almost entirely physically blurred subjects with whom we connect through their actions and thoughts. Its main feature is its universality. A great success of the narration is the combination of different perspectives of telling the story; that is, when the protagonists' thoughts appear, you can have greater empathy towards them and understand their actions. The public and the private is an idea continuously manifested throughout the text; the personality of each of the characters develops and delves into the other's corners, which allows the reader to connect with the psyche of each one.
Isadore or absolute love is a text that captivates from the first page; its power lies in how the story resembles life itself, the rhythm is build by the daily life of Isadore and Josue, which sometimes seem to observe everything from afar. We know of their existence because they are named; naming, in this case, makes them present and, at the same time, makes them disagree between themselves. The novel also develops the theme of names and their meaning. In this sense, the very name of the characters creates dichotomies and conjunctures that attentive readers can observe.
The power of the word's meanings here is enormous since each one has a weight considering that the chapters are small and with few lines, you can create an atmosphere and images with a minimum amount of expressions. The rhythm it leads is attractive because it allows a precise sequence of the novel's problems to be carried out. This is definitely a 21st-century book, for the 21st-century, a writing that could seem to be fragmented but in fact reminds us how we consume stimuli and emotions nowadays.
To read Isadore or absolute love is an exercise in reflection and a view into the depths of the human soul through its relationships with others, which, despite how painful it may feel, must be looked at to be understood and understood interpreted. Finally, perhaps it is Tolstoy's phrase with which he begins Anna Karenina, one of the many ways in which the atmosphere of Alejandra Gotóo's novel can be described: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
