Memorias Del Sanatorio

The story that unfolds in Memorias del Sanatorio has its beginnings in the mental vortex that engulfs Arnaldo Morales after the suicide of his father. There is no possible resurrection after that fact,and our main character is hospitalized in a quirky mental sanatorioum in Spain, where the sons and daughters of well to do in Latin American families, as well as of the Spanish bourgeois, are hospitalized with the hope of some miraculous cure of their mental illness from which they will continue to suffer in the clinic, year after year, in the hallways and the rooms of the Esquerdo The characters that inhabit these halls of the asylum are markedly interesting in their contorted psychologies, in their delusional systems, in the inventions of the imaginations that lead them somewhere that they do not remotely expect: the end of their shadows past the gray walls, the corridors they follow going nowhere through the center of the despair of their schizophrenias: the end of their delusions that do not provide with a way out. The writer has gotten his material for the novel from his own experience as he walked these corridors, and the streets that appear in the narrative; and of course from the experience of mental illness. One more important aspect of the narrative: The narrator find himself in the streets of Miami Beach throughout the novel, from where he recollects the thirty years past when the remembrances from the sanatorium took place. The world is going to end, like it happens in the end of every millennium, and a new imperator comes to MB to witnesses the executions of the insane.

The book starts in the neighborhood of Miramar in San Juan, Puerto Rico towards the end of the 1960s It begins in midst of a relationship between two college students. The woman is Susan Ruiz, the daughter of a well known artist of the time, who is seeped in European culture: and her male counterpart is Hector Ramon Martinez, the son of a renown medical doctor who lives in Ocean Park, a neighborhood of established professionals. The novel takes place in the middle of the intellectual, political, and drug culture of the time. Hector Ramon Martinez, who aspires to be a writer, but who suffers a severe mental breakdown, is sent to Spain where he is hospitalized in the Esquerdo Sanatorium before he drifts through different cities in an attempt to find himself, in a valid reason for his life. The two of them will meet again in New York University in Manhattan where even though they are in the process of drafting their doctoral dissertations, they walk and talk the streets of the Big Apple without a clear idea of what they can become. The result for him, at any rate, is this convoluted text.