El teatro de la luz

Fundación MonteLeón Award

“El teatro de la luz is an intense, original novel, with a clear desire to make its stylistic mark, away from the well-worn paths trodden by contemporary Spanish writing …” Leer

“Hurtling along at breakneck speed, Vico’s novel hooks the reader.” Albert Lladó, La Vanguardia

“Juan Vico’s characters tend to be underdogs (albeit free ones), depicted in unsettling, sordid settings. Above all, he portrays them in their search to break with convention, in keeping with his unconventional writing style: working with surgical precision to sculpt the manifold facets of human personality and establishing himself firmly within an authentic, non-conformist classical approach that bears witness to his mature aesthetics, guaranteeing the endless, always bountiful connections between an urban setting, cinema and literature, sure to delight all kinds of readers.” Agustín Calvo Galán, Revista de Letras

(The Theater of Light) Barcelona, the 1920s. Mauricio is a young skeptic with one single passion: the movies. A chance encounter leads him to make the acquaintance of Emilio Ciret, a director seeking to break new ground in an artistic form that has already fallen prey to bourgeois complacency, shooting the seamier side of city life. Racketeering, crime, prostitution … Mauricio throws himself headlong into his passion for the silver screen and becomes Ciret’s screenwriter, assistant and confidant. The protagonists of El teatro de la luz tread the perilous line that separates the well-heeled from the murky underworld. The novel breaks free of the conventions of noir fiction in a brilliant, at times experimental, exploration of the ties that bind life, cinema and literature.