Late February 2022, the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Viktor Romanovsky, a literary translator from Spanish living in a suburb of Kyiv, finds himself in a situation where he must help a neighbor evacuate her and her children from under shelling. This is how he ends up in Poland, and soon afterward in a small mountain town in southern Spain, where he continues working on his translation of the novel 2666-Roberto BolaƱo's dark epic, predicted to become a herald of 22nd-century literature.
The search for the mysterious writer Archimboldi, the serial murders of women in the fictional city of Santa Teresa on the U.S.-Mexico border, and much else become intertwined in Romanovsky's mind with the events unfolding in his homeland. Unexpectedly, he too finds himself drawn into a search-this time for a painting he happens to come across in the Prado Museum...
In the deeply lyrical narrative Ana on the Porch, literature becomes both a refuge and a battlefield, as well as the inspiration for a love the protagonist certainly did not expect to find in Spain-yet found nonetheless.
This book is a kind of meditation, an attempt to answer the question of what it means to live, create, and love during a bloody war fought for the right to be free.
