Author: Nancho Novo
- Fiction
- Bartleby Editores
- ISBN: 9788492799503
- Release Date: 01-01-2012
-Reviewed by: Piers Armstrong
The story follows Jaime, a Gallegan university student of the 1970s who is pursued by a fantastical creature. The creature, a beautiful woman, is his ideal lover and the fruit of his imagination. However, she is autonomous, and hails from a parallel universe or world (à la Harry Potter) which is comprised of other fantasies and the ghosts of real and usually famous people, notably 1970s Anglo rock stars, and eminent literary characters (Sancho Panza, etc.). The main axis of the plot concerns her determination to
transcend her existential virtuality by becoming human, supplanting any human rivals and living happily ever after with Jaime. After many comic misadventures in the parallel world, she succeeds, but is born as an infant, creating a certain age discrepancy with Jaime (she is 30 when he is 50). This incompatability, presented as generally insurmountable given society's prejudices, is also eventually overcome.
The narrative flips (in alternating chunks) between the two worlds. It also oscillates continually between two real world time-and-place points: late 1970s Galicia, and contemporary Madrid. Another bi-perspectivism, merely occasional until the end, where
it becomes crucial, involves differences between "the narrator" and "the author" as to appropriate story content; two possible endings are presented.
The novelist is audacious and creatively facile. The protagonist, a loveable anti-hero, is an every-man type who both engages the reader's sympathy and whose attitudes articulate much sophisticated urban repartee. Meanwhile, the love-story appeals in the opposite way, satisfying our penchant for romantic fantasy. This is peppered by another selling point, that of titillating erotic descriptions.
The cultural ethos of 1970s Galicia and Spain's anarchic and drug-centered counterculture through the pre- and post-Franco transition, has a notable testimonial value as a peninsular Spanish cultural sub-chapter which has many analogs in the broader Spanish speaking world and is thus emblematic and informative.
The triangulation of world-weary skepticism with fairy-tale romantic convention with testimony about 1970s drug culture sounds overly ambitious... and indeed it is. This book conflates at least three distinct narrative projects. As a novel, it fails in the attempt. It self-indulgently invokes the spirit of melodrama or even pantomime, and their license to resolve the incongruous. This is permissible and indeed habitual in Hispanophone TV sketch comedy, for example. But the inverosimilitude jars the literary ear – both the high-brow literary ear and that of more populist audiences. The protagonist is psychologically developed, while the other characters, real or fantastical, are bideminsional or caricatures. The book is also irritatingly and pointlessly long-winded, with the oscillation between worlds and time-zones marching along for almost 400 pages without respite or much structural variation except for arbitrary changes capriciously inserted at a couple of key points.
In short, the sheer scale of aesthetic and psychological indiscipline in this novel is surprising and even shocking given the evident intelligence of the author, and his background in theater, which one might expect to foment a sense of timing and a sensibility as to appropriate constraints on duration.
