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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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