Reviewed by Lea Jones
Do you have daddy issues and enjoy Brother Grimm’s tales? Well, the novella Only Smoke by bestselling Spanish author, Juan Jose Millas (Bellevue Literary Press, 2025), might be for you. Millás has written over a dozen novels and is a recipient of three of Spain’s distinguished literary prizes. He is known for blending fantasy with psychological analysis and challenging the mundane.
This literary fiction work has a slightly dark, immersive, and captivating tone. The story takes place in Madrid, Spain, and follows the perspective of an eighteen-year-old Carlos, who inherits his father’s apartment (whom he has never met) after his passing. When visiting the apartment with his mother, he finds a disturbing series of entries describing an affair, a white butterfly, and murder. While the oddity does not stop there, Carlos is not only a spinning image of his father, but also seems to take on parts of his personality after moving into his apartment. This happens after he begins reading from a Brothers Grimm book that his father previously had. Soon, he becomes engrossed with being transported through each story. This is what ultimately leads to the main takeaways of this slim novel, which asks psychedelic questions of control, imagination, and reality.
This story is meant to feel otherworldly, confusing, and unexpected at times. Though we do not meet our main character until he is eighteen and receive little information about his upbringing, Millás does a great job of expanding Carlos’ story with the larger one at play. Through reading about Carlos’ reading, we learn about the memories and desires of the living and of the dead. While the story is told from Carlos’s perspective, there are roughly seven other characters that orbit his life. The side characters that we learn the most about are Amelia and Carlos’s father, who is also named Carlos. These are also the two characters that young Carlos interacts with the most, with Amelia being his next-door neighbor, and young Carlos trying out his father’s clothes, books, and a bit of his life philosophies. The one character that I wish we got to see more of is Macarena, who is introduced at the beginning of the story. She was greatly involved in detail with the first half of the book, and towards the end seemed to sail through the pages, as time lapsed in the story.
The novella is split into three sections, between the transformation of the apartment and Carlos gradually taking ownership of his young adulthood. The first section gives a hint of the overly cautious life Carlos has lived with his mother, after his father abandoned both of them after his birth. Along with his conflicting feelings towards holding hatred and curiosity towards his father. A detailed scene of a white butterfly, oddly shaped like a little girl, then sends Carlos haunting the narrative his father left for him. By the end of this section, Carlos has gained a strange connection with his father and a newfound idea of transformations as, “this brought with it an idea of life as a succession of banishments from oneself.” In part two, we see how much Carlos has changed as he considers not starting college in the fall and carries a dreamlike state with him. The romance between Amelia and Carlos also blooms as he continues to take on more of the “dangerous” tone his father had. By the end of this section, time has moved well into the fall, and Carlos has been renting his father’s mysterious apartment to Ignacio, who becomes a fatherly figure to him. By part three, Amelia and Carlos have started a family of their own, and time continues to speed through as Carlos begins to create a plan to prevent his daughter from ending up like Sleeping Beauty. By the end of the novel, he burns the Grimms’ Fairy Tales book, and we are eleven years into the future, and Carlos and his family have expanded the two apartments into a single home, where the family is now the soul of the home.
This book leads you down a wonderful rabbit hole that makes you look deeper, past the fantastical elements and into the questions and thoughts of Carlos, from what view they share to what literature means and can do for us, in our society.