(Forms Catalogue) The protagonist of this short novel, the author’s first, is an architect. An architect who at first believes in the power of modern technology, then becomes disenchanted with it and ends up populating the forest with useless buildings. The narrative, however, does not take readers from one point to another in a linear fashion. This is not a biography, but a cubist portrait.
In Catálogo de formas the architect’s monologues alternate with the testimonies of those characters who share their lives in a singular vision of art and love as much as sex and terror, to quote Pascal Quignard. There is, throughout this first captivating and demanding novel, jumps in time and space, changes in viewpoints, shifts in language. We read the architect and his witnesses without quite knowing what part of the story we are in, but that is actually irrelevant: the novel does not ask the reader to assemble a jigsaw, but to move forward between the chorus of voices that construct the text, enthralled and amazed at the same time.