Nebiros

Lost and forgotten for over sixty years, then finally published on the centenary of the author’s birth, Nebiros is a claustrophobic and unsettling novel that leaves a lasting impression on the reader. It is a third-person narrative that follows the thoughts of a nameless protagonist as he wanders the streets and alleys of an unnamed city, over the course of a single night.

The novel opens as a man is finishing work in the business he inherited from his father, and waiting for his employees to depart so he too can leave. He goes out into the street and begins to walk around the city. He ambles towards the port, browses a bookstall, leafing through a book of magic entitled The Secrets of Hell, which lists the attributes of all the demons in the underworld, including Nebiros/Naberius who reigns over a sin so great it is never named in the Bible…

The strength of the novel lies in the claustrophobic atmosphere that Cirlot creates and the hold it exerts on the reader; one is immediately pulled into the protagonist’s mind and remains there until the final pages, as trapped as the protagonist himself in his restless, uneasy mind.

… It feels firmly rooted in the canon of twentieth-century existentialism, with echoes of Kafka, Sartre’s The Age of Reason and Ulysses…

From the reader´s report by Laura McGloughlin.