Spanish novelist Juan José Millás has a keen knack for high-concept metafiction that blends fantasy with reality. In From the Shadows, his first novel to be published in English, the protagonist, a forty-three-year-old multitasker in high tech, loses his job and hides in an antique wardrobe, where he creates a new self and personality. This time, in the slim Only Smoke, Millás sees through his looking glass into the legendary fairy-tale territory of the Brothers Grimm.
On Carlos’s eighteenth birthday, his father (also named Carlos), who had abandoned him and his mother, dies in a motorcycle accident, leaving him some savings and a tenth-floor apartment in Madrid. The walls are filled with books, among them a copy of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, “well-thumbed” by the parent his mother constantly refers to as “a troubled man.”
After Carlos moves in, he finds a notebook in which his father has recorded a narrative that might be autobiography or fiction. It recounts a story about a next-door neighbor, Amelia, an affair they had, and their daughter, Macarena. The story seemingly enters the realm of fantasy when Macarena tells Carlos Senior that a white butterfly came out of her ear and flew to the ceiling, and she became the butterfly as well as herself, “looking at myself in amazement.” When he kills the butterfly and, in Nabokovian fashion, pins it to a corkboard, and Macarena simultaneously becomes ill and dies, he is certain he has murdered his ten-year old daughter, Carlos’s half-sister.
In an effort to understand his father’s possible pathology, Carlos begins to read the brothers’ magical tales: “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Sleeping Beauty.” Something surreal happens: he finds himself falling into the stories, becoming “Ghost Carlos,” participating in fairyland events, discovering emotional parallels with the characters, even encountering a ghost Carlos Senior seeking his way out of a netherworld. The book seems to be alive; soon he cannot discriminate between the worlds of the tales and the supposed real world of Madrid, finding himself “simultaneously inside and outside the story.”
When not immersed in the stories, Carlos attempts to create a new life. Somewhat improbably, he develops a romantic relationship with Amelia and moves in with her; they have a daughter named Macarena who is the doppelgänger of her namesake. Soon, danger looms. Macabre encounters with a homunculus manifested from another Grimm fable lead Carlos to wish his father alive again. Fate seems to intervene when Ignacio, a documentary filmmaker from Barcelona, rents Carlos Senior’s apartment—in Millás’s Twilight Zone world, he might be the father’s reincarnation, and the younger man becomes convinced of this.
Readers are invited to tumble down Millás’s literary rabbit hole. Only Smoke is as much about books as it is about thwarted parent-child relationships. Carlos Senior, a language teacher, felt he had a “responsibility to read.” Patricia Highsmith’s Edith’s Diary is frequently invoked—like Carlos, its protagonist manufactures a life different from reality in order to find happiness. Amelia observes to Carlos, “If we’d been characters in a Patricia Highsmith novel, you’d have killed your father to be with me.” Carlos responds, “And who’s to say I didn’t?”
Carlos’s guilt follows him throughout his life. He studies administration and business management, and is on the way to becoming a risk manager at the suggestion of his mother’s boyfriend, who worked in that division of a bank. He also thinks it could be a way to handle the unpredictability and danger of life. Amelia believes this is an odd way to think: “Risks are not something you manage; they’re something you just suffer.” That may be another reason Carlos is entirely committed to fairy-tale dangers where he is in both places at once, and “two Carloses stayed connected throughout, like the two halves of a single brain.”
Ignacio and Ghost Carlos discuss the terrible things that take place in fairy tales as depictions of reality, which leads to a philosophical discussion of life as a “series of coincidences.” The younger Carlos finds it fascinating that, even in a world teeming with people and their own narratives, we still seek out fictional fairy-tale scenarios and characters, like “Sleeping Beauty,” which has it all: “the genetic and emotional burdens we come into the world with, how these get challenged over the course of a life, and the contrast between waking life and the dream world. But above all, the healing power of love.” Sleeping Beauty’s spindle recurs in a brutally ironic way in the startling, inexorable conclusion.
Black holes are a recurring motif in the novel, as are playful temporal shifts. But Millás’s final metaphysical transformation draws the reader into active participation in the novel. The proposition is 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 . . . there are some characters who believe in the reader and some who deny the reader’s existence.” But what would assign the characters’ lives meaning if there were no reader? This question becomes an existential dilemma when Carlos confronts Ignacio/Carlos Senior.
The specter of self-discovery in Only Smoke is spellbinding. As they did with their beguiling translation of From the Shadows, Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn adeptly capture the crispness of Millás’s dialogue and dark humor, seamlessly merging the brisk joint narratives. It can be read in a day. Then again and again. Like a very good fairy tale.
Copyright © 2025 by Robert Allen Papinchak. All rights reserved.
