Novel · Literary Suspense
Nothing
stays drowned
A man who invented a life discovers that his friend doesn't want what he has: he wants to be him.
What it's about
Twelve years ago, Daniel Montero invented a new life on the shores of the Caribbean.
A flawless existence, a solid identity, a carefully edited past. Then Ramiro arrives: a friend who comes to visit, stays a few days, and never quite leaves. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he begins to learn the house, the gestures, Daniel's exact place in the world. There's nothing you can put your finger on. And yet Daniel begins to feel that, in his own life, there's less and less room left for him.
On the peninsula they say the land forgives and the water remembers.
The opening lines
At forty feet the sea stopped giving back the colors. Red went first, then orange, and what remained was a blue that had nothing to do with the blue of the surface but with an older idea of blue, the one the water kept for itself and showed only to those who came down to look for it. Daniel Montero went down every morning, before the groups, before Iván, before the day filled with people who paid to see what he saw for free. It wasn't discipline. It was something else, closer to a need he had never bothered to examine too closely, because examining it would have meant admitting he had it.
He let himself sink to where the slope of the reef became a wall, and there he stayed still. That was the part. Not swimming, not looking at fish, not doing any of the things he would later teach the tourists to do with a borrowed camera. Staying still and letting the sea look at him.
Because the sea looked. Daniel had known it since his first dive, twelve years earlier, when he still knew nothing and had in excess everything he would later lose.
The beginning of something that, once it starts, doesn't stop.
Author's Notes
Behind the Story
Every book holds more than it reveals. Here I share the obsessions, symbols, and questions that shaped this story, one note at a time.
Read the Notes
About the author
Gastón Bouvier
Born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1980. In 2012 he decided to change the course of his life and moved to Mexico. His first stop was Puerto Vallarta, where he lived for eight years before settling in Playa del Carmen, where he currently resides. He had first discovered the Riviera Maya in 2010, during a vacation that—though he didn't know it then—would mark the beginning of a profound transformation. Nothing Stays Drowned is his first novel: a story about identity, desire, and the blurred line between loving someone and needing to be someone.
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