Language is not for God, but for man to get beyond his primitive feelings…"In Frederick Mark Kramer's They Shall Not Pass: A Novel of Manhattan and Madrid, the interior ruminations of disembodied, anonymous voices twist together in slow, constant alternation, and we gradually come to know four main figures: Jacobo, an American who fought in the Spanish Civil War and then returned to New York; Esmeralda, the woman he loved in Spain, who unbeknownst to Jacobo later ...

At the funeral of his old friend Jeff, who has committed suicide, Simeon, a poet in New York City, reencounters his old lover Liliana, who had also been Jeff's girlfriend and whom he has not seen for thirty years. Over drinks at the bar of the nearby Café Purgatorio, a long conversation ensues, trying to make sense of their three youths and what followed from them, again and again twisting together and pulling apart the circular trail of their steps and missteps. The more obsessively these...

This is the author speaking. I haven't the slightest idea what it's about that's why I wrote it.