STAY THIS DAY AND NIGHT WITH ME
by Belén Gopegui ; translated by Mark Schafer
Two unlikely futurists co-write an unusual application to Google.
Spanish screenwriter and novelist Gopegui's latest fiction employs a strange conceit: It's ostensibly a job application letter to Google written by the book's protagonists, 60-something Olga and 22-year-old Mateo. The letter forgoes any accounting of its authors' qualifications and instead recounts how the two came to write the strange application after meeting at a library. What passes for plot in the novel transpires almost exclusively through Olga and Mateo's winding conversations about robots, machines, algorithms, free will, and the future. While these philosophical exchanges walk the line between tedious rambling and mesmerizing contemplation, the book's more interesting moments occur when the narrators apostrophize Google to varying effect, at one point nearly beseeching the tech giant like a deity: "In Mateo’s house the barrages of water rush in without you even noticing." Other times, the two assert the limitations of their finite digital overseer: "The world, Google, is still filled with conversations you can’t see." The understated action takes a more urgent turn when it's revealed that Mateo has hidden a homemade bomb in his storage room, but this drastic revelation is undercut by Olga's facing a life-threatening condition. As Mateo notes, even such a dangerous device is minuscule compared to "the inevitable disappearance of loved ones."
Timely, contemplative metafiction that overrelies on the amusing, if quickly exhausted, charm of its conceit.