A concentration of time and space, a place of tension between the watched and the watched, who can find their positions exchanged, here the prison, the Black Palace of Lecumberri, becomes a small and tense tragic world circumscribed by a vigorous narrative structure, by an implacable language that takes on the very texture of these lives pushed to the limit, harassed by their obsessions, their fears, their anxieties. A masterpiece of the short novel, El apando reaffirms a writer capable of giving maximum intensity in the minimum length and of imprinting on our memory a core of heartbreakingly vivid characters.