Mice carcasses lie dead in the street. There are rumors that an old woman lured them there. Children laugh and disappear. In Way Far Away by Evilio Rosero, a man goes somewhere far away and explores the mysterious circumstances in which he finds himself. The prose is harsh and spare. It’s written in simple language, but the simple words paint fantastical scenes. One Hundred Years of Solitude’s magical realism meets the mystery and transience of Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story, “A Village After Dark.”  

Way Far Away is a hotel novel, i.e. a novel about impermanence, foreignness, and bad hotel breakfasts. Like in “A Village After Dark,” a man arrives in a small town and realizes he’s out of his depth. There is some sort of mystery unfolding in this town, which the narrator doesn’t understand. But there’s another underlying mysteriousness: Who is the narrator? Why is he in this town, staying in this hotel? How did he get way far away, and where is he going? 

While some of those questions are eventually answered, at least in part, much is left unresolved. None of the bizarre circumstances of the town or the narrator’s quest are explained. Death breathes down the neck of this novel, and instead of answers, we are only left with more unexplained death. 

Perhaps because of the lack of answers or disclosed meaning, the novel reads more like an allegory than a straightforward narrative. Only three of the characters are named, and the rest are only called by their profession or a characteristic: “the landlady,” “the cart-driver,” “the shopkeeper.” Disembodied voices tell the narrator to go search where he may find “the holding place,” “the losing place” and “the faraway place.” Religious imagery pervades, with much of the second half of the book occuring in a convent, complete with a chorus of nuns. Every time the narrator thinks he has pieced some information together, he soon learns that he still knows nothing.

This strange imagery combined with the vagueness of the plot makes the story seem allegorical. But of what? I could not identify what the book exactly is trying to say. There are certainly identifiable themes of loss, searching, grief, travel, and confusion, but to what end those themes serve is unclear. Even the answers to the questions the beginning of the book raises about who the narrator is and what he is doing don’t have a clear purpose. Perhaps it’s enough to revel in the strangeness and wallow in the despair, and we can let an explicit meaning escape us. But one thing is clear: in Rosero’s Way Far Away, nothing is as it seems.