RaveFull Stop... remarkable for the unexpectedness, the strangeness, the oddity at its heart ... despite its sticky, sexy, dangerous seductiveness, proves a bit hard to pin down when you eventually try to. Is this a story about family? About Florida? About queerness? About life and death? About art? About love? About sex and desire? About all the ways those things are close to but never quite the same as each other? I think it may be all of those things which marks the text as sneakily ambitious. I say sneakily because, as anyone who follows Arnett on Twitter will have expected, this writing is brash and funny and unpretentious. These are sentences you want to get a beer with (and quite a few of them are about doing just that) and shoot the shit. This is a book that might fall into that inscrutable category of a romp, though only a few of the literary romps I’ve encountered have aspired to such an impressive project. With such a high degree of difficulty, though, it does subsequently (like the gymnast who chooses the harder trick) sometimes miss the mark a bit. At times the lush prose tends towards purple, the complexities of Jessa-Lynn’s self-destructive tendencies inch towards caricature, and the slippage between past and present storylines occasionally tiptoe away from effectively hazy and dreamy into a confused page-flipping to make sure you know when and where you are ... But those things happen when you swing big, and Mostly Dead Things might be the biggest swing I’ve read this year. And when it nails those elements — which it does, often, to be sure — it is something special ... heart-crackingly real ... This novel is in many ways a highly successful piece of taxidermy; its seams barely show, and only if you know where to look.
Agustín Fernández Mallo, Trans. by Thomas Bunstead
RaveFull StopThe Nocilla Trilogy is a monumental and maddening piece of writing. Monumental in its scope and its sprawl, and maddening in how its form, in refusing to be pinned down, chips away at what we think we know about what a novel does, what poetry does, what books are for ... The Nocilla Trilogy is a phenomenon so complex as to perhaps not be distinguishable by looking at any of its individual parts.The trilogy is an explosion of the idea of narrative itself, or at the very least of what we understand realism to mean ... To call this trilogy realism feels out of place, because of its shocking left-turn away from received wisdom of what realism does and is; to call it anything but realism, though, is to ignore its canny fidelity to what it feels like to be in the 21st century ... Wading through Fernández Mallo’s copy-paste job in The Nocilla Trilogy can feel overwhelming and even tedious, but it is a juggernaut that doesn’t let you go, instead propelling you through its pages with a relentlessness that is as mesmerizing as it is edifying.
