“This is what death must be like. Something strange that creeps into us. Like tiredness, boredom, indifference. It immobilizes us and liberates us at the same time.” Ramiro Mendoza Elizondo, a hired gunman, sees killing as a mere formality, an act devoid of cruelty. One afternoon, in a chilango bar, he is ordered to murder Maricruz Escobedo, an executive and member of the elite society of San Pedro Garza García, his first female victim.

After committing a vicious homicide in a public street ten years earlier, Ramiro must retrace his steps. He must return to Monterrey, to the river he shared with starving animals and vagrants, to recognize the faces of those who were, of those who would become, his children and his wife. Avenue after avenue, in the sweaty traffic, as he stalks the woman who is about to die, the north winds throw at him snapshots of his past as Bernardo, El Chato, Genaro; From his years as a middle-class copy editor and a fan of Westerns, like a wetback and a prisoner. The rottenness of the dump where he lived has been replaced by commercial premises in a display of modernization; but its stench persists, and he can still distinguish it.

This new edition of Eduardo Antonio Parra's debut novel recovers the powerful tale of a murderer marked by the courage to disregard his base instincts and pursue them no matter what. In it, barbarism and poetry coexist in unforgettably violent scenes that give way to introspective monologues and dialogues with the richest colloquial vocabulary, as readers stroll through Monterrey and the border of Nuevo Laredo, described with the precision that characterizes the author's narrative. With Nostalgia for the Shadow, Parra has conceived a masterpiece about the hidden impulse to abandon ourselves, to cease existing once and for all.