Víctor Lapuente turns 'Immanence' into a philosophical thriller.

There is no more effective way to capture the reader than to suffocate them from the first page. Immanence It begins in a hospital room with a motionless body, a prisoner of itself, and from there it branches out into three narrative times— rural Aragon in the nineties, a dystopian Sweden of the future, the convulsive Europe of the present —which end up folding around the same question: to what extent are we masters of our lives, our ideas, our freedom? Víctor Lapuente, political scientist and essayist with more than a decade analyzing the seams of democracy, debuts in the novel with an unusual ambition: to write a moral fable without a moral, a political thriller without heroes, a love story without sweetener.

It is no coincidence that the title comes from philosophical vocabulary and that the first pages intersperse definitions from Ferrater Mora and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The book is a treatise on ideas disguised as an action novel, but the disguise is so well crafted that the reader enters it without realizing it. The author assembles scenes of suspense—an escape through the Nordic forests, a break-in at a clandestine library, a chase for fugitives in the so-called Western Republic—with a lyricism that betrays readings of Dostoevsky and Margaret Atwood. There are echoes of Orwell and Houellebecq, but also a Mediterranean fondness for sensorial detail, for the smell of Barcelona's plane trees, for the dry dust of the Monegros mountains , for the insidious humidity of Gothenburg.

The merit of Immanencia lies in the fact that it works on several levels at once. It is a generational portrait , with its Aragonese adolescents obsessed with the Holy Grail and their sentimental exile to Anglo-Saxon universities. It is a political novel , capable of speculating on an extreme democracy that monitors with algorithms and virtual prizes, a utopia turned dystopia without the need for caricatures. And it is, above all, a meditation on memory: the chapters alternate voices and eras with a cinematic rhythm that demands attention, but never loses the reader, because Lapuente knows how to close each scene with a visual detail—a black umbrella, a metallic sculpture, a hexagonal door—that remains recorded like a sequence shot.

There are even moments when the book allows itself the luxury of slowing down. The prose pauses to observe the North Sea , the protagonist's obsessive rituals, the elegant silences of an old-fashioned Nordic woman. This taste for introspective detail makes the reader believe they know Martín, Anna, Emma ; that they share their paranoias, their dilemmas, their betrayals. There are no epic heroes, but human beings traversed by politics and history.

Lapuente knows how to close each scene with a visual detail that is recorded as a sequence shot.

It's clear that Lapuente has read political philosophy and data science, but also crime fiction and science fiction. The Western Republic he imagines is not a futuristic caricature, but a plausible extrapolation of our hyperconnected democracies: algorithms that reward civility, social surveillance with a friendly face, censorship by consensus. The Forbidden Library is reminiscent of Borges, but its atmosphere of clandestinity is that of a contemporary thriller; the exodus of fugitives recalls The Handmaid's Tale , although there is no patriarchal totalitarianism here, but rather a society that has become a prison due to excess of virtue.

The book's greatest achievement lies in its narrative style. The temporal transitions are precise, the dialogue exudes naturalness, and the style, though cultured, avoids the baroque. Lapuente uses a clean register , with long sentences that glide by as if dictated, with powerful images—the sea as an "endless carpet basking in the sun," the Scandinavian forest as a "jungle planned by diabolical goblins"—that set the tone without affectation . There is irony, there is dry humor, there are cultural nods that enrich without pedantry.

Immanencia is also a Spanish novel without complexes . It dares to describe rural exodus, adolescent boredom in a village in Alto Aragón , and the culture shock of expatriates, without falling into local color or nostalgia. This local perspective coexists with a European, globalized spirit: Oxford, Gothenburg, Barcelona, ​​Los Angeles. And in this mosaic of settings, the reader detects a subtle critique of contemporary inequalities, of the unfulfilled promises of technology, of the dogmas that replace religions.

And we're grateful that Lapuente doesn't underestimate the reader . The novel doesn't conform to market formulas or seek complacency: it demands attention, invites reflection, plays with layers of meaning. But it does so with the pace of a page-turner , with chapters that end in suspense, with an intrigue that never dissolves in theory. That combination—dense ideas, addictive plot—is the highest praise one can give to a literary debut.

Immanencia confirms that Lapuente, known for his essays on political ethics and his ingenuity as a columnist, has translated his obsession with power , social structures, and public morality into fiction. But this isn't a thesis disguised as a novel, but rather an authentic novel that illuminates the thesis. It's a daring, elegant, and necessary work: a Mediterranean dystopia that speaks to our times better than any newspaper editorial.

There is no more effective way to capture the reader than to suffocate them from the first page. Immanence It begins in a hospital room with a motionless body, a prisoner of itself, and from there it branches out into three narrative times— rural Aragon in the nineties, a dystopian Sweden of the future, the convulsive Europe of the present —which end up folding around the same question: to what extent are we masters of our lives, our ideas, our freedom? Víctor Lapuente, political scientist and essayist with more than a decade analyzing the seams of democracy, debuts in the novel with an unusual ambition: to write a moral fable without a moral, a political thriller without heroes, a love story without sweetener.