“Now the prince of this world will be cast out” (John 12:31) serves the author to provoke them from the title itself. A prince with the potential to be cast out through multiple entrances.

'75-'76, although never explicitly stated, are the dates that the text seems to encompass. On one hand, a dockworker activist, a Trotskyist, a major strike, a crisis of the union bureaucracy, one, two, or three dead..., a traitor, a defendant; and on the other, a jazz-loving, lumpen, mediocre lawyer with delusions of grandeur, eager to aspire to the status of an Onetti-esque character. Both cross paths at this sinuous boundary that divided the same decade into two distinct eras marked by rise and defeat.

But also, like one arrow upon another, the agony of the novel, undisputed king of the 19th century, and its successor: cinema. As one of its characters says, “(...)The best novels of the 20th century, those that maintained a certain vitality, are precisely those that destroy the genre, those that describe its funeral, those that denounce it as a straitjacket for expression, and those that, ultimately, culminate with a preemptive announcement: the definitive silence of the genre(...)”. The reader will feel that this is not only stated but that it impacts the very form of the novel, and slowly the narrator will dismantle, disarticulate, become less believable, unravel, and defame until almost extinction. This hinders the reading of a novel that is consuming itself, hovering, at times, on the brink of the abyss of the genre.