The dynamite charge is about to go off in the mine, but the fuse takes longer than expected and someone comes out to check. From then on, the lives of the characters in Irineo, the winning work of the 2019 Rosario Castellanos International Short Novel Award, will change irreparably. Alejandro del Castillo deploys a surprising temporal structure to tell us the story. What happened before, what happens now and what happened after are interspersed until, like stones, the narrative lines little by little reveal a clear profile that allows them to be recognized, to know what they are made of, where they come from and where they are going. We identify the parts and then ask ourselves, like when a rock breaks and we stare at the pieces that made it up, how was it that all of that had been one thing before and not many different ones forever? The unity of a stone, a person, a community, a country, is it just an illusion? Rarely does an author debut with a novel so solid, yes, like a rock.