Time’s performance

Time’s performance

Novel
Seix Barral 2015, Editorial Candaya, 2016
528 pages

What can one do against the arrogance of eternity? Only one thing: to live. Or two: to live and to tell. The narrator of this story, Juan Guerra —a movie’s entrepreneur who barely feels like a writer— suffers from “chronophobia” and sees how time acts ruining things and facts: “Time is a performance that can be seen”. The task of talking about that performance makes his writing reacting against time with the epic of the insect that confronts a beast.

For him, a life is not only a biography that takes place between two dates. Any man lives his personal time, but also the history’s time and the eternity’s. What happens to him is happening to the human race too.

Time’s performance is a novel about people’s deepest privacy and the inscrutable greatness of the universe. Love adventures, sex habits, family crisis and oasis, work and leisure comedies, death’s numerous costumes, trips, historical account and others’ lives are unfolded and connect as parts of an organism that seeks to survive oblivion.

A human life is always a thousand-heads drama. This book —like time— starts with the Big Bang and ends with the Big Crunch. Between them float both our stories and Juan José Becerra’s proven skills, who consolidates, doubtlessly, as one of the great narrators of Río de la Plata.

Time’s performance is a prodigy of writing, and knowing how to think the world (and its time) from literature and for literature. J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip. Babelia – El País

When this novel ends with the only leap into the future, 2067, is definitely clear that that language already exists and it is that of the best fiction. Excellent book. Nadal Suau. El Cultural- El Mundo

A great book, a masterpiece (…) Juan José Becerra, is “the” great Argentinean novelist. Daniel Guebel. Ñ, Clarín

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