Beneath the Current of Our Existence:

“Enter into this tragicomic melodrama the author himself in a stroke of metafiction that predates the emergence of postmodernism by nearly fifty years—Unamuno the Author intervenes in Augusto’s suicide attempt, informing his central agonist of his fictitiousness and insisting that a figment of the imagination does not have such luxuries as the right to die.“

This is a book by Miguel de Unamuno and anyone familiar with the late Spanish essayist can tell you, that means it is a psychic stew. Whether writing of Cervantes’ crowning creation, Don Quixote, or the agony of Christendom, the infamous rector is impassioned, distracted, and all over the place. He is also on fire, on point, and knows exactly where he is going, whether he realizes it or not.

“The web of life is being woven and unraveled at the same time. And from time to time we get breaths and vapors and even mysterious murmurs from that other world, from that interior of our own world.”