Sly manipulation of tense allows 87 pages to do the work of a book three times in length, yet efficiency is no end in itself. Counterintuitive as it might seem, in Rosero’s hands the novella - that ungainly form sandwiched between the short story and the novel, lacking in both the genre-expectations and commercial viability of either - proves, in this case, to be the ideal world-building vehicle.

Rosero takes the absurd kernel of a character living in a wardrobe and imagines a surrounding world to explain it, sketching boundaries with the rigorous inner logic of a dream. It might be sleight-of-hand, but Stranger to the Moon gives the impression of being improvised at speed. The narrator’s passing description of fellow naked ones as “more man than woman, or more woman than man” indicates a certain fluidity, but to what extent gender is influenced by sense of self, coercion, or the tension between these factors, remains unresolved.) In the interim, he refuses meat and sharpens his fingernails, awaiting his turn to leave the house. (Even though the word “gender” makes no appearance in the book, as a concept it does still come into play. With the narration being in first-person, the narrator’s gender pronouns do not come up until 24 pages in, when a party of clothed ones refers to him as a “dead man walking” and forces him to look into a mirror for the first time: “I barely glimpsed something, or someone who, from his place, had no desire to see me either.” For reasons that go unexplained, and despite a seeming reluctance, the narrator doesn’t question this attribution and treats his gender as a given until the final pages. They live out their lives in pursuit of mere subsistence, competing to become “favorites” among the clothed partygoers who reward feats of degradation with scraps of meat - calling to mind Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.īy describing this state of things, the unnamed narrator, a naked one distinguished only by a habit of living inside a wardrobe, poses a threat to its illusory timelessness. Naked as they are, the inhabitants of the house cannot conceal their “double sex” (that is, each person has both male and female genitals) which, in the book, serves as the pretext for their oppression. There they hold regular parties intended to torture and police their prisoners, as well as subjecting any naked one who leaves to further torture.

The clothed ones force the naked ones to live in an overcrowded house of unlikely, if not impossible, dimensions.

In the funhouse mirror that is Evelio Rosero’s Stranger to the Moon (published in 1992 as Señor que no conoce luna), characters belong to one of two classes: the “clothed ones” and the “naked ones”. Translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft and Anne McLean

Evelio rosero stranger to the moon