Categoría: Novela

Desde Lecturas para compartir, en su cuenta de Tiktok @biblioetsidiump, la biblioteca ETSIDI UPM recomienda la lectura de Sunny, de Colin O’Sullivan.

Publicado originariamente bajo el título The Dark Manual, nos cuenta la historia de Susie, una joven afincada en Japón que acaba de perder a su marido y a su hijo en un accidente de avión. Destrozada, se siente incapaz de seguir adelante.

Pero comienzan a suceder cosas extrañas: recibe un robot, Sunny, de la empresa en la que trabajaba su marido, y que había diseñado para ella, alguien registra su casa… Así el relato va ganando en texturas, llegando a ser en algún punto una comedia con tonalidades  en negro.

Sunny, título que ha prevalecido en una reciente edición -siguiendo la estela de la serie televisiva-, es un thriller tecnológico fascinante que consigue superar este género para crear una ficción compleja que logra atraparnos.

Colin O’Sullivan (1974-) es un escritor irlandés que vive en Japón desde hace más de veinte años y, como Susie, aún no domina la lengua nipona. Este autor prolífico recibió la distinción Prix Mystère de la Critique (Francia) por su primera novela: Killarney Blues.

Sunny : The novel

Two red orbs from the black. Sometimes this is all you get. At night, if all the lights are off, this is all you get, glaring back: two red orbs from deep black.

These are its eyes. Scarlet, but bloodless. It makes them strange. Eyes with no blood, no whites, are strange. No irises, no change, strange.

And they do not blink. Homebots have no need to blink. Specks of dust in their eyes won’t bother them. No sties. And they do not cry. There are no tear ducts, and anyway, what would they have to cry about?

At night. Lights off. Two red orbs from the black.

Robots have yet to become sentient beings, though they may be on their way. Susie Sakamoto doesn’t think too much about this. Instead what she thinks about is her husband and son, who are most probably dead, and these days she wants to be quite dead herself. She spends most evenings balled-up on the couch, dishevelled, angry, hurting, hungry without ever really wanting to eat, pondering the best way to go about putting an end to it all. A final solution. Is there? Is there really any way out of this?

The silver, one-metre-tall homebot (Model SH.XL8) is hoovering the living room floor, sucking up dust through the soles of its feet, almost silently, hovering like it is weightless, like it has no body at all and is not a compact, complex mass of wires and circuits encased in plastics, chrome, metals, whatever the hard actual stuff of it is called—Susie does not know the names of such materials, nor does she particularly care; she has enough to be dealing with. The dirt gets collected in filters in its lower section and gets compressed, and those filters can be later removed, emptied out into the rubbish bin by the ’bot itself. That’s right. It is able to remove its own filters. It knows what to do. It can clean itself out without any apparent fuss. It can go about its business without any discernible hitch. All menial tasks are done in this way. Fuss-less. Homebots have become rather adept.