It’s impossible to deny the impact on Latin American literature of a Sicilian author who, somehow, managed to join Borges with the great French moralists: Leonardo Sciascia. The reading of Sciascia is particularly important in Juan Cárdenas’s latest novel, in which politics, religion, and industry (three quintessentially Sciasian themes) are as important as sex or nature, two themes that Cárdenas tends to favor in this, one of the preeminent Latin American novels of the 21st century.