Institut Ramon LLull

Following his mother’s premature death and his father’s descent into madness, Ishmael finds a love of reading that serves as an escape route from his difficult childhood and leads him on a path to university and teaching. Just as random fate brought him to a supportive group home, his luck continues with a chance reencounter of a woman he’d fancied as a child. They are sowing the seeds of intimacy when his destiny takes a U-turn as confusing as it is devastating.

Amnesiac and struggling, he awakens in what appears to be a hospital, tended to by doctors whom he dubs Bovary and Zhivago, and wondering if his name is Hans Castorp. Panicked and confused, much of Ishmael’s narration is told in dialogue bordering on the absurdist. In parallel, we are privy to the ruminations of a young boar reflecting on time’s arrow. Suspense builds as Ishmael grapples with a spiral of lies on his quest back to his “reality” yet, drawn like a moth to a flame, he is unable to elude his fate.