In Only Smoke, the new novel by award-winning Spanish writer Juan José Millás, the line between the everyday reality in which readers of a story live and the dimension in which the characters in that story ‘exist’ becomes fundamentally blurred. The line is even more hazy when a fictional character is reading a story, distinguishing the reality in which she exists from the reality in which the characters exist in the story that she is reading.
What’s more, in Only Smoke these boundaries are permeable. The reader is clearly in for a ride.
In Only Smoke, 18-year-old Carlos learns that his father, who deserted the family when Carlos was an infant, has died and left his apartment to him. When he inspects the apartment, Carlos discovers a copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. He also finds his father’s notebook, disclosing that he had an affair with Amelia, the neighbor across the hallway, and fathered a daughter. Moreover, the notebook states that the daughter was somehow associated with a white butterfly and that when his father caught a white butterfly and pinned it to his corkboard, the daughter clutched her chest and died.
Carlos then picks up the volume of fairy tales. He finds that, when reading “Cinderella”, he splits into real Carlos and ghost Carlos, the latter existing as an unseen presence who can move among, and even telepathically communicate with and direct, the characters in the fairy tale:
“[O]n the one hand…he was right there, with the book in his hands, but on the other, he found himself literally inside [the fairytale]. He was in two places at once, and both were equally real.”
This identity split occurs again when he reads “Hansel and Gretel” and other fairy tales. Indeed, in this short novel, Millás creates a trans-dimensional dynamic depicting how, often with difficulty, his characters move into and out of the Grimm Brothers’ stories:
“Ghost Carlos tried to return to the body of the real Carlos…but found he wasn’t able to. He appeared be stuck inside this narrative.”
In one fairytale, a character makes a hole in a wall inside of which a tiny, wish-granting homunculus lives; real Carlos then breaks a hole in his real bathroom wall and finds the same homunculus, who grants Carlos’ wish that his father be returned to the living with awareness that he is Carlos’ father. This is so that Carlos may take revenge upon his father for abandoning him. It is obviously worth noting that Amelia is a pharmacist, at times slipping codeine into drinks and offering so-called “analgesic powders” to Carlos.
Only Smoke embeds a variety of issues into a fairytale storyline. What is a story’s reality if a reader can change a story by communicating with its characters? Fairytales, in particular, mine the deep vein of human archetypes, whose function would be forever undermined by the reader’s intervention.
Questions of personal identity also abound. In what sense is the daughter also the butterfly? In what sense is a reader both in his room and Cinderella’s castle? Only Smoke raises this philosophical question: What bestows meaning to a fictional character’s life?
One character notes that Carlos’ father had expressed the notion that “characters in novels often meet on one of the blank pages at the end of the book, and they have discussions about the existence of the reader, just like we discuss the existence of God.” Another character responds that calling the reader God “has major implications… because if the reader doesn’t exist, how could the characters’ lives have any meaning?”
Thus, the issue of the source of meaning of characters’ lives, including unread characters, is addressed. One asks whether Carlos’ father ever wondered “whether his life had a reader”. Millás does not examine whether it makes sense to talk about the meaning of fictional characters’ lives, read or unread. Instead, Only Smoke posits for our consideration the relationship between meaning and observation, and whether the reader’s consciousness is what gives meaning to the characters’ lives.
Analogous to the issue presented by Millás, it is interesting to note that modern physics also raises the very same question of “reality and observation.” At the smallest scale, quantum physics holds reality to be essentially probabilistic. Each fundamental particle is in every possible state all at once. It is without meaning until it is observed, at which point it resolves into the reality of only one of its multitude of possible states. Just as with Millas’ characters, observation creates reality and meaning.
This novel might be a confused novelty in the hands of a lesser writer. In the hands of Millás, Only Smoke is an expertly crafted and thought-provoking read.