Rave3am Magazine... a radically different novel but nonetheless a book just as deserving of critical praise ... The more than three hundred pages of this highly ambitious novel could generate in itself an essay as long or even longer than the novel ... often reminds one of Roberto Bolaño’s masterpiece 2666 ... Stories and histories, woven in time and space, present events and images that at first sight may seem to be clever inventions of the author, but which are soon revealed to be true facts around which the author has skilfully woven his fictions...A fantastic world inscribed within this one that is nothing else but, in any case, the flipside of the world we read about in the newspapers. And that might be why it seems to have such a hallucinating quality, especially alongside the present feeling that we are living in a time when it has become impossible to separate facts, fake news, memories and illusions ... All of this is achieved through a skilful usage of language, or perhaps I should say of languages, as each of the novel’s five polyphonic sections bears traces—as conscious homage—of authors that Fonseca admires, while maintaining a rhythm that keeps us in suspense for the entire length of this singular narrative. Natural History is, then, a novel woven together through the resonance of its metaphors ... Within this complex game of Russian dolls that Fonseca has constructed, nothing remains more fascinating and enthralling than the experience of reading it. Amidst intertextual references and philosophical winks, Natural History is above all a story that displays the power of a mighty imagination capable of transporting us to a myriad of scenarios and situations, conveyed through entertaining and dazzling prose. Fonseca is, without a doubt, one of the great writers of a new generation that is beginning to gain a name within Hispanic literature. And from what we can see, he is far from having exhausted his creativity.
