Between Illusion and Collapse: Alberte Momán Noval’s La realidad difusa

In his 2025 novel La realidad difusa (“The Diffuse Reality”), Galician writer Alberte Momán Noval delivers a stark, unflinching vision of contemporary existence under the weight of manipulated perception, moral exhaustion, and social decay. It is a book that reads less like fiction than like a feverish dispatch from the end of belief—a forensic report on what remains of the human when truth itself has been privatized.

From the opening line, Momán plants his reader inside a world where reality has become an industry. “Creating realities is not a particularly complex job,” declares the novel’s first voice, a professional fabricator of worlds who designs psychological scenarios for political parties, corporations, and war machines. In a few lucid pages, the writer sketches a chillingly plausible landscape in which perception is outsourced and democracy survives only as an after-image. The speech could belong to a consultant in data analytics or to a propagandist in a dystopian thriller; but Momán’s tone—dry, procedural, disturbingly calm—turns it into a philosophical confession. Reality, we are told, is a market commodity, and consciousness the last frontier of exploitation.

A World of Engineered Perception

What follows this quasi-manifesto is not science fiction but psychological realism pushed to its moral limit. The book traces the fall of Tersites De Agrio, a suspended police officer whose name evokes the loathsome truth-teller of Homer’s Iliad. Like his mythological namesake, Momán’s Tersites dares to see too much. His attempt to expose corruption within the “New Private Police” costs him his job, his dignity, and, gradually, his sanity.

The first part of the novel, “La insoportable levedad del ser” (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”), mirrors Milan Kundera’s title only to dismantle it. There is no metaphysical lightness here—only the suffocating density of a world governed by algorithms of desire. Tersites, disgraced and jobless, wanders through a landscape of synthetic cravings: he suddenly experiences an uncontrollable urge to eat a chocolate-filled bun advertised by a commercial he cannot recall seeing. The banal image becomes a symptom of systemic intrusion, an external program rewriting his private hunger. When he realizes the desire has been implanted, he slams his head against the steering wheel to “erase” it. The gesture—comic, pathetic, tragic—captures the book’s essence: the human mind as a battleground between autonomy and programming.

Momán writes this descent with the patience of a sociologist and the intensity of a confessional poet. His prose is long-winded by design: sprawling sentences accumulate sensory detail until the reader feels the same saturation that afflicts his characters. The effect is claustrophobic but purposeful. Reading La realidad difusa is like being trapped in a loop of consciousness where the noise of consumer desire drowns out the self.

From Precarity to Dehumanization

After losing his job, Tersites moves in with Etra, an elderly widow living on a meagre pension. Their relationship, a mixture of companionship, dependency, and displaced affection, provides the novel’s emotional core. Etra’s home, filled with blankets covering worn furniture and the scent of boiled vegetables, becomes a fragile refuge from the outer world’s corruption. Yet it is also a microcosm of systemic poverty: the small acts of care that sustain life are constantly threatened by scarcity.

Momán is particularly incisive in depicting precarity as a total condition—not just economic but existential. Tersites, unable to find regular work, turns to sex labour. His clients are anonymous men seeking quick relief in parked cars and gas-station toilets. The body, once an instrument of authority, becomes a commodity. Etra, aware but forgiving, locks herself in her room when Tersites brings clients home. Her empathy is not naivety but a strategy for survival: she has learned that forgiveness costs less than confrontation.

This section of the novel, titled Precariedad, reads like a sociological study disguised as intimate drama. The dialogue between Etra and Tersites alternates tenderness and despair. She nurtures him as if he were her lost son; he clings to her as to the last semblance of affection. Their dinners of vegetables and cheap wine turn into rituals of resistance against invisibility. Yet beneath the surface lurks the same virus of domination that governs the outer world.

The Violence of Dependency

Momán’s courage as a storyteller becomes evident when he refuses to idealize the relationship. In one of the most disturbing scenes in recent Spanish-language fiction, Tersites rapes Etra after a dinner argument about food. The episode is narrated without sensationalism, almost clinically. The horror lies not in explicit detail but in its moral complexity. The assault is the logical culmination of accumulated humiliation—social, sexual, emotional. Tersites is both perpetrator and product: a man deformed by systems that teach domination as the only form of expression.

Etra’s reaction—dignified silence, followed by an attempt at comprehension—turns the scene into a meditation on forgiveness in conditions where morality itself has been eroded. Her subsequent isolation and Tersites’s flight through the night streets echo the structure of classical tragedy. What Momán achieves here is not pity but ethical vertigo: he forces the reader to confront complicity, to see how violence circulates through the social body and returns in intimate forms.

Power and Punishment

The following chapter, “Infra penalidades,” deepens the theme of systemic abuse. Tersites is summoned by his former superior, a police commissioner whose paternal tone masks predatory intent. The scene unfolds as a parody of bureaucratic mentorship that degenerates into sexual assault. The commissioner offers reinstatement in exchange for submission: “I could speak to the higher-ups if we establish a closer relationship.” When Tersites resists, the assault becomes physical, culminating in rape on the office desk—a mirror image of his own earlier crime.

This brutal symmetry is central to Momán’s moral architecture. Power reproduces itself through repetition: victims internalize domination, transforming it into behaviour. The act of being violated reveals to Tersites the structure of the world he once served. His subsequent collapse—oscillating between rage, shame, and self-annihilation—marks the novel’s shift from social realism to metaphysical paranoia.

The Economy of Flesh

Sex, in La realidad difusa, is never erotic. It is a currency of survival, a way to measure inequality. In gas-station bathrooms, parking lots, and seedy bars, Momán captures the geography of modern degradation with anthropological precision. His writing recalls the early novels of Michel Houellebecq but replaces cynicism with compassion. The scenes are not pornographic; they are testimonies of alienation. Each body is a ledger of power relations, each encounter a transaction between desperation and contempt.

The introduction of Pentesilea, a seasoned sex worker who becomes both antagonist and ally, injects new energy into the narrative. Her name, borrowed from the Amazon queen of Greek myth, suggests a warrior’s code amid corruption. When Tersites meets her in a red-lit bar, he believes he recognizes a fragment of his past—a reflection of his own lost humanity. Their relationship oscillates between exploitation and solidarity, and culminates in an unexpected alliance with Etra.

Momán’s decision to interweave theoretical reflection into this section—invoking Baudrillard and Benjamin on cloning, reproducibility, and the loss of aura—could seem jarring, yet it works. The author uses the philosophical digression to frame Etra and Pentesilea as singularities within the mass, two women whose capacity for empathy defies the cloning of behaviour imposed by late capitalism. Their conversation over coffee, filled with laughter after so much horror, offers the novel’s only moment of grace: a fleeting alliance between two forms of resistance.

Cycles of Repetition

But grace cannot hold. The penultimate chapters, “Repetición” and “Brumas sobre lo real,” return to the logic of recurrence. The commissioner, undeterred, re-enters Tersites’s life; the circle of abuse closes again. Reality itself becomes recursive: hallucinations blend with memory, dreams contaminate perception. A talking cat appears—an avatar of surveillance, a digital ghost infiltrating the mind. Through this surreal intrusion, Momán literalizes the idea of psychological hacking introduced in the first chapter. The narrator’s voice, once external, now lives inside Tersites’s head. The system has completed its work: the subject is no longer able to distinguish between imposed images and genuine experience.

The cat’s taunting dialogue, at once absurd and terrifying, is pure Momán: philosophical speculation delivered through grotesque realism. “I’m only an image in your brain,” the cat tells him, “but I could make everyone see me if I wanted.” The line captures the novel’s epistemological horror—the awareness that perception itself has been colonized.

Tersites’s ensuing car crash, triggered by hallucinations of chocolate buns and phantom erections, feels like both accident and allegory. He crashes not into a wall but into the material limits of his own mind.

The Last Mercy

The final chapter, “El miedo. La redención,” opens in a hospital room. Tersites wakes from a coma to find Etra asleep beside him. A black cat—perhaps real, perhaps imagined—sits on his chest. The voice returns, mocking, omniscient. “You’re lucky,” it says. “Only a few bruises.” The scene wavers between tenderness and delirium. When Etra offers him water through a straw, he mutters accusations against the cat, against the system, against himself. She doesn’t understand, but she stays.

In that simple act of care—offering water to a broken man—Momán locates the novel’s faint possibility of redemption. Not salvation, but persistence: the stubborn survival of empathy in a world designed to erase it. The ending is deliberately unresolved, leaving the reader suspended between lucidity and madness, between recovery and relapse. The diffuse reality of the title is not a setting but a condition: the fog that settles over perception when truth and fiction become indistinguishable.

Language as Exposure

Stylistically, Momán writes with the discipline of a documentarist and the rage of a moralist. His paragraphs are dense, rhythmic, almost hypnotic; they refuse the convenience of quotation marks and paragraph breaks, forcing immersion. The result is a voice that feels both collective and intimate—a chorus of social despair channelled through one consciousness.

The language alternates between bureaucratic precision and poetic abrasion. Lists of ingredients, medical terms, and brand names coexist with mythological references and philosophical citations. This mixture is not ornamental but diagnostic: the contamination of discourse itself mirrors the contamination of reality. When a police interrogation echoes a corporate meeting, or when a recipe for stir-fry becomes an existential manifesto, Momán reveals how capitalism colonizes even syntax.

Themes and Resonances

La realidad difusa belongs to a broader constellation of Iberian and Latin American literature that confronts the politics of perception—writers like Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Fernanda Melchor, or Samanta Schweblin. Yet Momán’s voice is distinct. His background as a Galician author writing within and beyond regional traditions infuses the text with a specific melancholy: the awareness of periphery, of being spoken through by larger powers. The novel’s landscapes—gas stations, decaying apartments, industrial wastelands—could belong to any post-industrial zone in southern Europe. Its realism is globalized and local at once.

At its heart, the book explores three intertwined ideas:

1. The commodification of reality. The “reality engineer” of the opening chapter is not science fiction but a caricature of data manipulation, political marketing, and digital surveillance. Momán’s insight is that control no longer operates through censorship but through over-production of images. Truth is diluted by abundance.

2. The precarization of affect. Relationships in the novel—Etra and Tersites, Tersites and Pentesilea, power and subaltern—are shaped by scarcity. Love becomes a survival economy. The line between care and dependence blurs, producing violence as a by-product of need.

3. The erosion of agency. By the end, Tersites no longer acts; he reacts to implanted desires, hallucinations, and commands. His tragedy is not moral failure but ontological capture: he has become a medium through which the system speaks.

These ideas could have produced a cold, didactic novel, but Momán avoids abstraction through empathy. His gaze, though merciless, is never detached. He writes the poor, the abused, the broken not as sociological types but as embodiments of shared vulnerability.

A Mirror to Our Present

Reading La realidad difusa in 2025 feels eerily contemporary. The manipulation of perception through social networks, the gig economy’s normalization of precarity, the blurring of news and propaganda—all resonate with Momán’s invented world. Yet the book refuses topicality; its realism is metaphysical. It asks not what happens when technology deceives us, but what happens when we prefer the deception.

In that sense, Momán aligns more with the existential tradition of Dostoevsky or Bernhard than with dystopian futurists. His true subject is guilt—the guilt of complicity, of passively accepting distorted realities because they are convenient. Tersites’s self-destruction becomes a collective allegory: a civilization so addicted to simulation that it loses the instinct for truth.

Between Literature and Testimony

One of the most striking aspects of La realidad difusa is its refusal to conform to genre. It reads at once as noir, political allegory, and psycho-social essay. The narrative voice shifts seamlessly between external description and interior monologue; philosophical commentary merges with obscene detail. The result is a hybrid form that challenges both reader and critic.

Momán’s approach to realism recalls the term “dirty hyperrealism”: he amplifies the textures of everyday life until they become surreal. A gas-station shelf, a cracked heel, a plastic bag clinging to a face—these details accumulate into metaphors of suffocation. The reader is never allowed distance; empathy becomes endurance.

Ethics of Representation

Given its explicit violence, La realidad difusa raises ethical questions about representation. Does showing rape and degradation risk normalizing them? Momán’s answer lies in his tone. The scenes are not invitations to voyeurism but acts of witness. His style denies pleasure; the language itself resists consumption. By confronting readers with discomfort, he forces awareness of what polite narratives omit. In this sense, his work continues the lineage of social realism not as moral preaching but as aesthetic resistance.

Momán’s Evolving Project

For those familiar with Momán’s earlier works—Lapamán, Raro, or As que dormen sobre a palla—La realidad difusa marks both continuity and intensification. His recurring concerns with marginality, identity, and the moral cost of survival are pushed here to their extreme. Where Lapamán dissected isolation through fragmented coastal imagery, La realidad difusa dives into urban decay; where Raro explored subjectivity through stylistic experimentation, this new novel anchors its experiments in brutal realism. It feels like the culmination of two decades of inquiry into the intersection of ethics and form.

A Difficult, Necessary Book

It would be misleading to call La realidad difusa an enjoyable read. It is demanding, sometimes exhausting, often painful. But it is also urgently necessary. In a literary landscape saturated with ironic detachment and algorithm-friendly minimalism, Momán insists on difficulty as moral stance. His prose asks the reader to slow down, to think, to endure ambiguity—the very capacities eroded by the culture he critiques.

At the same time, the novel is not despairing. Its bleakness is underwritten by faith in expression itself. By articulating the mechanisms of manipulation, Momán reclaims language as resistance. His characters may be crushed, but the narrative that contains them refuses silence. In exposing the architecture of deceit, the book performs an act of defiance.

Conclusion: The Diffuse Mirror

By the time we close La realidad difusa, we are left with a paradox: the more clearly Momán describes the world, the more uncertain it becomes. His “diffuse reality” is not an external dystopia but our shared present refracted through the lens of fiction. The novel’s power lies in its refusal to simplify—its recognition that truth today is not hidden but excessively visible, scattered across screens, diluted into pixels.

Alberte Momán Noval has written one of the most uncompromising Spanish-language novels of recent years, a work that transforms political outrage into literary form. It confronts readers with their own thresholds of empathy, asks how much brutality we can absorb before turning away, and then whispers that turning away is itself the first step toward complicity.

In the end, La realidad difusa offers no catharsis, only clarity: a mirror smeared with the fingerprints of power, through which we glimpse, dimly, ourselves.