Return to the Dwarf City

After years abroad, a biologist returns to his provincial hometown, forced by economic hardship and professional disappointment. He moves in with his mother, whose pride in the city's superficial progress—new malls, apartment towers—contrasts with his own sense of loss and alienation. The city, once mocked for its backwardness, now exerts a strange, deterministic pull. The biologist's foreign credentials mean little here; he takes a temporary teaching job at a girls' school, resigned to the role of substitute, haunted by the sense that destiny, or perhaps the devil, has won. The return is not triumphant but tinged with resignation, nostalgia, and a subtle dread of the city's unchanged, underlying forces.

School of Lost Purposes

The biologist's new job at the all-girls school is marked by apathy and routine. The students, mostly from poor towns, are disciplined but disengaged, their lives shaped by strict rules and unspoken tragedies—half the local girls are pregnant. A question about evolution and avocados leads the biologist to muse on adaptation and extinction, using the fruit's uselessness after its animal dispersers' extinction as a metaphor of adaptation and evolution for his own irrelevance. The school, with its faded Virgin Mary and rigid order, becomes a microcosm of the city: a place where old forms persist, oblivious to the world's changes, and where the biologist's attempts at meaning are met with indifference or misunderstanding.

Ghosts in the Family Home

Living with his mother in a sterile new house, the biologist is plagued by insomnia and regret. The home, designed without warmth or purpose, mirrors his own sense of displacement. Nights spent smoking on the porch bring fleeting peace, but also guilt over his mother's silent disappointment—her favorite son, the younger brother, is dead, and the biologist feels like a failed draft of a life. The city's cruelty, the randomness of fate, and the mother's unspoken grief create a suffocating atmosphere. The biologist's own failures—divorce, career collapse—are internalized as part of a larger, inescapable pattern of loss and adaptation.

Provincial Progress and Stagnation

The city's outward signs of progress—new highways, political debates, and economic development—mask a deeper stasis. The biologist's mother is enthralled by a local entrepreneur, a horse breeder and political figure, whose bluster on the radio reveals the emptiness of public discourse. At school, the biologist is interrogated by colleagues about his mysterious benefactor, suspecting nepotism or hidden connections. The city's social fabric is woven from favors, secrets, and unspoken debts. The biologist's sense of agency is undermined by the realization that his life is shaped by forces beyond his control, whether familial, political, or economic.

Nightlife and Old Flames

A night at a bar brings the biologist into contact with a woman from his past—his brother's former girlfriend, who once served as a beard for his brother's hidden sexuality. The encounter is tinged with nostalgia, confusion, and the unresolved trauma of his brother's death. The biologist's interactions with the city's nightlife—dealers, old friends, strangers—reveal a community bound by shared histories and secrets, but also by a pervasive sense of disconnection. The past is never far away, resurfacing in unexpected ways, complicating the biologist's attempts to move forward.

The Dealer's Dark Showers

The biologist's closest friend in the city is a drug dealer who finds solace in showering in total darkness, seeking visions and a sense of transformation. Their conversations, wandering through the city's empty streets, become meditations on language, adaptation, and the blurred boundaries between reality and perception. The dealer's invented slang and rituals echo the biologist's own struggles to adapt, suggesting that survival in the city requires constant reinvention. The city itself, with its decaying colonial architecture and hollow symbols, becomes a stage for existential drift and the search for meaning in the mundane.

Dream of the Dead Brother

The biologist dreams of returning to his childhood home, searching for keys that no longer fit, and encountering his dead brother alive in the street. In the dream, their roles are reversed: the biologist is now the ghost, trapped in the house, while his brother escapes into the world. The dream encapsulates the unresolved grief and guilt that haunt the biologist, the sense that he has inherited a role he cannot fulfill. Waking beside a new lover, the biologist is left with lingering unease, the boundaries between past and present, life and death, blurred and unstable.

Passionflowers and Hummingbirds

On a drive to a friend's hacienda, the biologist recalls his uncle's passion for natural history, the family plot filled with exotic plants and hummingbirds, and the stories that shaped his own scientific calling. The uncle, a failed dreamer and political outcast, becomes a symbol of resistance to the city's conformity. The biologist's gratitude is tinged with guilt for neglecting his uncle, now in a group home. The memory of the uncle's lessons—about observation, patience, and the hidden order of nature—contrasts with the biologist's current sense of paralysis and avoidance, especially regarding his brother's death.

The Hacienda's Telenovela

At the hacienda, the biologist is drawn into a gathering of TV producers and actors developing a telenovela about slavery and emancipation. The project, set in the very house where atrocities occurred, becomes a battleground for debates about representation, humor, and historical trauma. The biologist, an outsider, observes the group's tensions—between Black and white, gay and straight, artist and technician—mirroring the unresolved legacies of the region. The hacienda, symbol of respectability and tradition, is revealed as a site of violence and denial, its magic undiminished by knowledge of its past.

The Unsolved School Murders

The biologist learns from a colleague about the recent murder of two girls from his school, a fact previously hidden from him. The revelation shocks him, exposing the city's capacity for denial and the fragility of its social order. The school, once a place of routine and safety, is now marked by violence and secrecy. The biologist's sense of security is shattered, and he is forced to confront the reality that beneath the city's surface lies a history of unresolved crimes and collective complicity.

Dinner with the Grande Dame

A dinner at the hacienda brings the biologist face-to-face with a powerful local politician, the grande dame, whose rambling monologues blend conspiracy theories, religious dogma, and climate change denial. The gathering, meant to celebrate art and progress, devolves into a display of privilege, racism, and willful ignorance. The biologist is both amused and appalled, recognizing the ways in which power perpetuates itself through spectacle and denial. The dinner becomes a microcosm of the city's contradictions: tradition and modernity, faith and cynicism, surface harmony and underlying violence.

The Plantation's Hidden Wounds

The biologist reconnects with his first love, now leading a research project on the palm weevil, a pest devastating the region's monoculture plantations. She offers him a job, appealing to his expertise in pheromones and adaptation. The work promises purpose and financial stability, but also implicates him in the very systems—monoculture, ecological destruction, corporate power—that he distrusts. The biologist's decision to accept the job is both an act of survival and a surrender to the logic of adaptation, raising questions about complicity, ethics, and the limits of individual agency.

Letters, Accidents, and Adaptation

The biologist recalls the letters from his ex-girlfriend, detailing her accident and amputation, and the ways in which trauma reshapes identity. Their reunion is marked by honesty and mutual recognition of change. The palm weevil project becomes a metaphor for adaptation: the insects evolve new chemical signals to evade human control, just as people must adapt to survive in hostile environments. The biologist's own journey—from exile to return, from science to complicity—mirrors the evolutionary processes he studies, blurring the line between victim and agent, adaptation and surrender.

The Birth of a Monster

In a moment of crisis at the school, a pregnant student goes into labor, giving birth to a baby covered in hair, with strange chitinous protrusions. The event, witnessed by the biologist and the director, is both miraculous and monstrous, evoking religious awe and scientific curiosity. The girl claims the child's true father is the Knight of Faith, a figure associated with a local religious cult. The birth becomes a symbol of the city's hidden traumas, the intersection of faith, biology, and the monstrous, and the ways in which the community responds to the inexplicable with denial, conspiracy, or exploitation.

The Knight of Faith

The biologist is summoned by the director to a secret meeting, but is instead abducted by unknown men and brought before a mysterious old man—the "knight of formaldehyde." The encounter is surreal and menacing: the biologist is forced to hold an empty jar, listen to a story about a singing machete, and declare himself a technician rather than a wise man. The old man's parable blurs the lines between victim and perpetrator, knowledge and ignorance, adaptation and complicity. The biologist is released, shaken and changed, his sense of agency further eroded by the city's labyrinthine power structures.

The Biologist's Abduction

The biologist's abduction and interrogation reveal the city's hidden networks of surveillance, coercion, and violence. The old man's insistence on the biologist's role as a technician—someone who solves problems without seeking wisdom—underscores the limits of rationality and the dangers of curiosity. The jar of formaldehyde, left empty for now, becomes a symbol of potential complicity, the threat of being preserved as a specimen rather than an agent. The biologist's release is anticlimactic, leaving him with a sense of disappointment and unresolved dread.

The Machete's Song

The old man's story of the singing machete—a tool of both healing and violence—serves as a parable for the city's history and the biologist's own predicament. The biologist is forced to participate in the retelling, identifying himself as the drop of blood, the silence after the song. The story's endless repetition, its refusal to resolve, mirrors the city's cycles of violence and denial. The biologist's complicity is both chosen and imposed, a condition of survival in a world where stories are used to justify power and suppress dissent.

The Jar of Formaldehyde

After his release, the biologist accepts the job on the palm weevil project, moving into his old family home and adopting a routine of work and care. The city's problems—ecological, social, political—persist, but the biologist finds solace in small acts of adaptation: caring for animals, visiting his uncle, focusing on technical solutions. The jar of formaldehyde, now a recurring image in his dreams, symbolizes the preservation of trauma, memory, and complicity. The biologist's resignation is both a coping mechanism and a form of surrender to the city's inescapable logic.

New Work, Old Guilt

The biologist's new life is marked by routine and small comforts, but also by persistent guilt and the unresolved mystery of his brother's death. Visits to his uncle, now in a group home, become rituals of remembrance and connection. The city's violence and impunity remain unaddressed, the biologist's own role in its systems of power ambiguous. The birth of the hairy child, now celebrated as a miracle by a local pastor, becomes a public spectacle, further blurring the line between the monstrous and the miraculous, the individual and the collective.

The Dealer's Visions

The dealer, seeking meaning in darkness and altered states, becomes a symbol of the city's search for transcendence amid despair. His rituals—showering in the dark, seeking visions—mirror the biologist's own attempts to adapt and survive. The dealer's musings on language, reality, and the limits of perception echo the novel's central themes: the difficulty of distinguishing truth from fiction, the ways in which stories shape and distort reality, and the necessity of adaptation in a world that resists understanding.

The City's Miniature

The biologist wanders through a miniature replica of the city, reflecting on the provincial sense of humor as both a survival strategy and a form of resignation. The city's self-mockery, its embrace of diminutive forms, becomes a metaphor for its inability to confront its own history and violence. The biologist's abduction, release, and subsequent adaptation are framed as part of a larger cycle of change and stasis, in which individuals are both agents and victims, complicit and powerless.

The Cycle of Change

As Holy Week approaches, the city is transformed by heat, flowering trees, and the rhythms of daily life. The biologist, now wearing his dead brother's clothes, reflects on the necessity of adaptation: to survive, one must change, amputate what no longer serves, and accept the inevitability of loss. The city's cycles—of violence, denial, adaptation—continue, but the biologist finds a measure of peace in routine, care, and the acceptance of his own limitations. The novel ends with a call to embrace change, to tend one's own garden, and to find meaning in the ongoing struggle to adapt and survive.

Characters

The Biologist

The unnamed biologist is the novel's central figure, a man marked by exile, failure, and return. His scientific training and rational mindset are constantly challenged by the irrationality and violence of his hometown. Haunted by the death of his younger brother and the weight of family expectations, he oscillates between resignation and resistance, seeking meaning in work, routine, and small acts of care. His relationships—with his mother, uncle, ex-girlfriend, and the dealer—reveal his longing for connection and understanding, but also his tendency toward avoidance and self-doubt. Over the course of the novel, he is forced to confront his own complicity in the city's systems of power, ultimately choosing adaptation and survival over heroism or wisdom.

The Mother

The biologist's mother is a formidable presence, embodying both the city's resilience and its capacity for denial. She is fiercely protective of her children, especially the dead younger son, and her love is tinged with disappointment and unspoken reproach. Her embrace of the city's superficial progress and her ability to leverage tragedy for social gain reveal her pragmatism and cunning. She is both a source of comfort and a reminder of the biologist's failures, her mammalian love both nurturing and suffocating. Her silence about the family's traumas speaks volumes, shaping the biologist's sense of guilt and responsibility.

The Younger Brother

The biologist's younger brother, though dead before the novel begins, exerts a powerful influence over the narrative. Once sensitive and artistic, he is transformed by family and societal pressures into a model of masculine success, only to be murdered under mysterious circumstances. His secret life—his sexuality, his political entanglements—remains unresolved, fueling the biologist's guilt and the family's denial. The brother's absence is a constant presence, his memory both a source of pain and a standard against which the biologist measures himself. His death symbolizes the city's violence, hypocrisy, and the impossibility of closure.

The Uncle

The biologist's uncle is a failed revolutionary, a lover of nature, and a teller of stories. His passion for plants, birds, and the hidden order of the natural world shapes the biologist's scientific calling. Marginalized by the family and society, the uncle represents resistance to conformity and the value of observation, patience, and humility. His decline and institutionalization mirror the city's neglect of its own history and the biologist's guilt over abandoning his roots. The uncle's lessons—about interconnectedness, emotion, and the limits of knowledge—resonate throughout the novel, offering a counterpoint to the city's logic of adaptation and survival.

The Ex-Girlfriend

The biologist's first love, now a researcher leading the palm weevil project, embodies resilience and transformation. Her traumatic accident and amputation become metaphors for adaptation and the necessity of change. Her letters, honest and unsparing, force the biologist to confront his own avoidance and complicity. As a scientist, she is pragmatic and driven, but also aware of the ethical ambiguities of her work. Her relationship with the biologist is marked by mutual recognition of loss and the possibility of renewal, offering a model of survival that embraces both vulnerability and agency.

The Dealer

The dealer is the biologist's closest friend in the city, a figure of marginality and adaptation. His rituals—showering in the dark, inventing slang, seeking visions—reflect a search for meaning and transformation in a hostile environment. He is both a source of comfort and a reminder of the city's dangers, his outsider status paralleling the biologist's own sense of displacement. The dealer's musings on language, reality, and perception echo the novel's central themes, and his friendship with the biologist becomes a space for honesty, humor, and shared survival.

The Director

The director of the girls' school is a figure of order and control, decisive and unflappable in crisis. Her interactions with the biologist are marked by mutual respect and a shared sense of resignation. She is complicit in the city's systems of power, aware of the violence and secrets that underlie the school's routine. Her role in the birth of the monstrous child and her involvement in the biologist's abduction reveal the limits of her authority and the ways in which even the most competent individuals are caught in the city's web of complicity and denial.

The Grande Dame

The grande dame, a local politician and socialite, embodies the city's elite: privileged, performative, and deeply invested in maintaining the status quo. Her rambling monologues blend conspiracy, faith, and denial, revealing the ways in which power perpetuates itself through spectacle and absurdity. She is both a source of comic relief and a symbol of the city's refusal to confront its own history and violence. Her interactions with the biologist and others expose the deep divisions and hypocrisies that underlie the city's surface harmony.

The Knight of Formaldehyde

The old man who abducts and interrogates the biologist is a figure of power and ambiguity, blending the roles of technician, storyteller, and executioner. His parable of the singing machete serves as a metaphor for the city's cycles of violence and complicity. He forces the biologist to confront his own role as a technician—someone who solves problems without seeking wisdom—and to accept the limits of agency and understanding. The knight of formaldehyde is both a threat and a mirror, embodying the city's capacity for coercion, adaptation, and the preservation of trauma.

The Hairy Child

The child born to the pregnant student, covered in hair and with chitinous protrusions, is both a miracle and a monster. Claimed as the child of the Knight of Faith, the baby becomes a symbol of the city's hidden traumas, the intersection of faith, biology, and the monstrous. The community's response—ranging from awe to denial to exploitation—reveals the ways in which the inexplicable is absorbed into the city's cycles of adaptation and survival. The hairy child is a living embodiment of the novel's themes: mutation, adaptation, and the blurring of boundaries between the natural and the supernatural.

Plot Devices

Fragmented Narrative and Shifting Perspectives

The novel employs a fragmented, nonlinear narrative structure, moving between the biologist's present experiences, memories, dreams, and digressions into family history, local politics, and natural history. This structure mirrors the protagonist's psychological state—disoriented, haunted, and searching for coherence in a world that resists resolution. The use of multiple perspectives, unreliable narration, and embedded stories (such as the tale of the machete) creates a sense of ambiguity and complexity, challenging the reader to piece together meaning from disparate fragments.

Metaphor of Adaptation and Evolution

The novel repeatedly uses metaphors from biology—adaptation, extinction, mutation, pheromones—to explore themes of survival, complicity, and change. The biologist's lectures on avocados, the palm weevil's evolving signals, and the monstrous birth all serve as allegories for the ways in which individuals and communities adapt to hostile environments, often at the cost of integrity or agency. The tension between adaptation and resistance, survival and surrender, is central to the novel's exploration of power and identity.

Parable and Allegory

The novel frequently employs parables and allegories—most notably the story of the singing machete—to illuminate its themes. These embedded stories serve as both commentary and critique, exposing the ways in which narratives are used to justify violence, suppress dissent, and enforce conformity. The repetition and variation of these stories mirror the city's cycles of violence and denial, and the biologist's forced participation in their retelling underscores the limits of agency and the dangers of complicity.

Foreshadowing and Symbolism

The novel is rich in recurring images—jars of formaldehyde, passionflowers, hummingbirds, monocultures, the hairy child—that serve as symbols of preservation, adaptation, and the blurring of boundaries between the natural and the artificial. Foreshadowing is used to create a sense of unease and inevitability, as the biologist's journey moves inexorably toward confrontation with the city's hidden powers and his own complicity. The use of dreams, visions, and surreal events further destabilizes the boundary between reality and fiction, reinforcing the novel's themes of uncertainty and transformation.

Analysis

The Devil of the Provinces is a profound and unsettling exploration of what it means to survive in a world shaped by violence, denial, and systemic power. Through the journey of a biologist returning to his provincial hometown, Juan Cárdenas interrogates the myths of progress, the persistence of trauma, and the ways in which individuals are both agents and victims of history. The novel subverts the conventions of detective fiction, refusing resolution or moral clarity, and instead offers a collage of stories, memories, and parables that illuminate the complexities of adaptation and complicity. The recurring metaphors of evolution, mutation, and preservation underscore the necessity—and the cost—of change, while the city's cycles of violence and denial reveal the limits of rationality and the dangers of seeking wisdom in a world that rewards only technical solutions. Ultimately, the novel challenges readers to confront their own roles in systems of power, to recognize the ways in which survival often requires surrender, and to find meaning in the ongoing struggle to adapt, resist, and care for others in the face of uncertainty and loss.

Last updated: August 31, 2025