4 ideas
Gabriel Barrios is a young, well-off Lima television presenter who spends his nights snorting cocaine in the bars and clubs of Lima's upper-class nightlife, where he falls obsessively for Mariano, a young rock musician. The novel follows his nocturnal pursuit of Mariano through the city while he hides his bisexuality from the audience that knows him.
In a small, status-obsessed upper class, drug use, homosexual desire and infidelity are tolerated as long as they stay inside private circles. The same people condemn them the moment they become public. Read this way, respectability works as a system for managing visibility rather than behaviour: the sin is being seen, not doing it.
Being a recognizable face in a small city gives access to money, clubs and desirable people. It also makes every desire a potential scandal, so the celebrity must perform a heterosexual, wholesome self on screen while living another life off it. The fame that opens doors to pleasure is the same force that makes honest pursuit of it impossible.
The narrator talks directly to the reader in breathless run-on sentences full of Lima slang, English borrowings, jokes and self-deprecation, as if gossiping at a party. This rapid, intimate voice pulls the reader into the narrator's confidence and makes his vanity, snobbery and self-destruction feel charming. The reader becomes an accomplice before they have had time to judge him.