A man who lies in a dying bed embarks on a mental monologue from the mechanization of the arts, represented in the appearance of the pianola - materialization of the democratic dream that anyone can be an "artist". His reflection turns out to be a sharp tirade against modern society, with its longing for fortune and recognition.

In this posthumous novel William Gaddis finally managed to give shape to one of the literary projects of all his life; The result is a heart-rending narrative that gives no respite and is a magnificent diagnosis of the effects of technology, not only in art, but also in the depths of contemporary everyday life.

"Jack Gibbs, cast figure in Jota Erre and narrator of Agape is paid, is addressed to us from his deathbed and is not a happy storyteller. His body has betrayed him and the world is shit and is dominated by technocrats. And his novel - in which it has been working for years - breaks down into loose and disconnected pieces. There is little time to reassert the same thing forever: technology can never supplant the creativity of men. So farewell to the conventional score and hello to the free flow of conscience and the free association of ideas that allow the narrator - to the reciter, in an almost delirium of agonizing - to invoke both Glenn Gould and John Kennedy Toole, Michelangelo and Tolstoy, to distil a last magic potion, a tonic to try to get the "agape": the loving feeling of being one with the world celebrated by the first and not bureaucratic Christian writers. He does not get it, of course. But in the failure of Gibbs is the triumph of Gaddis alerting from the Beyond on the invisible but certain music of the entropy. And that is really what this small, immense book is: a final tractat and a final will and a final desire that we at least try to understand the incomprehensible. And then we'll see what to do about it. "

Extract from the prologue by Rodrigo Fresán