Complex follows the life of Willy, an Ecuadorian writer and student on scholarship in Malaga, Spain. In a wry and self-deprecating tone, the novel provides a first-person account of life as an Ecuadorian migrant in Spain. This fragmentary and often poetic meditation on the Ecuadorian identity crisis, and on the ways in which it intersects with masculinity and machismo, does not shy away from making the reader feel by turns amused and repulsed: Willy is a character who is difficult to love yet impossible to hate, a dizzying contradiction of removed analysis and unbridled emotion, of self-awareness and instinct. Willy's misadventures take him to strange and at times disturbing places, and this is not the stereotypical tale of life as a migrant. Rather—as the title hints at—it is something more obscure, more convoluted, more complex.
