L’ABISME (The Abyss)

We all have a reason to fall. What’s yours?

Octavi Fontseca is in crisis: his marriage is crumbling and he is unable to move past his writer’s block.
There is hardly a trace of the writer who transformed all the rage he felt because of a broken childhood into a novel that erected him as the voice of a generation. Thirty years have passed since then, and Octavi continues to live from a past that no longer exists.
His publisher becomes impatient and suggests that he publishes under his name a manuscript that he has not written. One morning, two policemen inform him that his mother, who had abandoned him when he was little, has been found dead. The autopsy reveals that before she died, she swallowed a stone; a stone that holds secrets and memories of a long-forgotten life.

Excerpt from the book:
“There are people who drink to cheer themselves up, to forget everything. He drinks to remember, to sink more into the blackness that he carries within and that blackens everything. It was in that state that he wrote Eye for an Eye and The Love That Awaits Us, and since then, it seems to him that in that hole is his true self. It is the only part of him that is worthwhile. This, at the same time, frightens him. You can’t live swimming in a glass of whiskey, they say. He drinks and refills the glass.”