La Edad de la Punzada / The Age of the Sting

Esta es la historia del peor alumno del colegio. Correcci鏮: de la historia del colegio. Con casi catorce a隳s, unos cuantos apestados sociales por amigos y el bolet璯 de calificaciones constelado de c甏culos rojos, nuestro protagonista sobrevive a un instituto s鏊o-para-varones so鎙ndo a toda hora con esas vecinitas a las que nunca ha osado saludar. Si otros inadaptados no saben lo que quieren, 幨 lo tiene tan claro como su timidez: una moto y una chamarra negra.

Decidido a contradecir al retrato embustero del ni隳 con su afgano que preside la sala de su casa, el narrador de La edad de la punzada busca la mejor f鏎mula para fabricar p鏊vora, combate a sus vecinos con un rifle de di墎olos y bombas incendiarias, roba huesos en sus visitas al pante鏮, acaba con los nervios de dos padres quericos y de paso se deja enardecer por toda suerte de antojos secretos.

La edad de la punzada cuenta --presa de un ritmo vertiginoso que va del humor 塶ido al cinismo rampante-- la historia de una de esas adolescencias en picada donde todo parece salir mal, en medio de una prisa por vivir que invita a acelerar y cerrar los ojos, hasta que cualquier d燰 se despierta en lo hondo de un aut幯tico infierno para adultos: all?donde la risa es un mero recurso de sobrevivencia.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

"In short, a monster controls me --and I am that monster."

This is the story of the worst student in the school. Correction: in the history of the school. At almost fourteen, with a few social outcasts as friends and a report card covered in red marks, our protagonist survives at an all-boys school while spending every waking moment daydreaming about the neighbor girls he has never dared to greet. If other misfits don't know what they want, he has it as clear as his own shyness: a motorcycle and a black leather jacket.

Determined to contradict the lying portrait of the boy with his Afghan hound that presides over his living room, the narrator of The Age of the Sting searches for the perfect formula to make gunpowder, wages war on his neighbors with a pellet rifle and incendiary bombs, steals bones during his visits to the cemetery, drives his cherubic parents to the brink --and along the way lets himself be consumed by every kind of secret desire.

The Age of the Sting tells --at a breakneck pace that swings from acidic humor to full-blown cynicism-- the story of one of those downward-spiraling adolescences where everything seems to go wrong, in the midst of a frantic urge to live that invites you to speed up and close your eyes... until one day you wake up in the depths of a true adult hell: where laughter is merely a survival tool.