Overview

In this cerebral and unsettling novel, Miguel Ángel Mori leads the reader on a journey through conspiracy, philosophy, memory, and the silent machinery of modern power. The Confined of Reason opens with a group of eccentric elderly men in a Viennese retirement home-men who once carried the weight of Europe's intellectual and political history and now plot in the shadows as if the Cold War had never ended. But what appears at first to be a farcical adventure soon expands into something far more disturbing: a meditation on whether humanity itself has become the destructive agent of nature. When a group of young programmers is accused of designing a video game capable of triggering global annihilation, the fragile boundary between fiction and conspiracy collapses. A chimney sweep crossing the stables at three in the morning, a fake funeral cortege rolling through sleeping streets, a scattered network of spies, jugglers, street vendors, a Carmelite nun, and a tired police inspector who cannot escape the calls of his insomniac father-all of them converge in an operatic, darkly humorous chase through Vienna and beyond. Parallel to the plot, an unnamed narrator-half philosopher, half witness to his own inventions-struggles with the very nature of storytelling. Can a novel truly end? Should it? As he debates with the spectral figure of Mâtelet in a bar in Rosario, the narrative folds into itself, questioning the power and the futility of reason, the dangers of utopian dreams, and the mythologies we construct in order to survive our fears. Blending satire, existential inquiry, and political allegory, The Confined of Reason invites the reader to consider a provocative idea: What if humanity's destructive impulse were not a flaw-but its ecological purpose? At once playful and profound, the novel shifts effortlessly between scenes of comedic chaos and moments of philosophical clarity. It is a book about endings that refuse to be endings, about the secret lives of old men, and about the terrifying serenity of mountains that remind us how small our certainties really are. A novel for readers of Kafka, Borges, Lem, and the post-Cold War absurd; for those who suspect that intelligence, when pushed to its limits, begins to resemble madness; and for anyone who has ever wondered whether the stories we tell ultimately confine us-or set us free. ""A brilliant intellectual labyrinth."" Mori blends humor and metaphysics with a precision that feels almost dangerous. I read the last chapters twice-the novel folds in on itself like a Möbius strip. Unlike anything I've read in years. -Eleanor H., London ""Absurd, profound, and strangely moving."" It starts like a political satire and ends as a philosophical confession. The old men are unforgettable. The narrator's debate with reason itself left me breathless. A masterpiece of tone. -Daniel K., New York ""A Cold War opera performed by ghosts."" The funeral procession scene alone is worth the price of the book. Mori writes with the elegance of Borges and the dark humor of Kundera. A book to savor slowly. -Sabine M., Berlin ""A novel that questions the idea of novel."" When the narrator argues that endings are artificial, I felt it-deeply. This book speaks to our age of uncertainty. Philosophical fiction at its best. -Rajiv P., Toronto

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