Sometimes puzzling, even inexplicable, but rich. Just the thing for fans of Cortázar—and Borges, too.
Avant-garde Spanish writer Fernández Mallo delivers a curious blockbuster, comprising three novels published separately in Spain from 2006 to 2009: Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, and Nocilla Lab.
Fernández Mallo’s trilogy makes less a coherent tale than a long literary experiment verging on private joke. Named after a group of his acolytes, which in turn named itself after a hazelnut concoction similar to Nutella, the trilogy is about—well, a little bit of everything. At its heart are eccentric characters, often but not always inspired by literature: In Nocilla Dream, the first volume, for instance, a fellow who works long hours in a British textile factory returns home to train for a kind of high-wire acrobatics with a twist: "He and his friend Phil, dangling from a rope slung horizontally between the peaks of two mountains 125 meters up in the air, ironed clothes on an ironing board.” Extreme ironing isn’t for everyone; nor is the fixation of an Argentinian who finds himself in a Las Vegas hotel room boiling rice for his daily meals and reading and rereading the same passage from Jorge Luis Borges each and every day, the one about the map of an empire that corresponds, point by point and to scale, with the actual things and places of that empire. First known as a poet in his native Spain, Fernández Mallo writes with considerable elegance, if sometimes onrushingly: “We look for arguments to take us beyond this paradox, I love paradoxes, or I don’t love them, that’s stupid, it’s just that without them life wouldn’t exist and the planet would be a wasteland….” He's also worked as a theoretical physicist, which explains the frequent bursts of encyclopedic science throughout (“A person traveling in a spaceship near the speed of light for, say, one year as counted on their watch would return to earth to find that hundreds of years had elapsed”), while his punk-rock enthusiasms explain occasional appearances by the likes of singers P.J. Harvey and Bobby Gillespie.
Sometimes puzzling, even inexplicable, but rich. Just the thing for fans of Cortázar—and Borges, too.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-22278-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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