The nearly indescribable approach is part of the fun of Comemadre, especially given the confidence and poise of its delivery ... Comemadre shocks on each page, and it’s also very funny. It is absurd and straight-faced and frighteningly self-assured ... Part of the horrifying joy of this novel is how safely you can rest in the hands of a maniac as the narrative world is built and burned down around you.
...the novel is not concerned with excoriating particular bad actions, and it would cheapen the text to read it as a mere dystopian warning against particular medical experimentation. The doctors’ cavalier attitude toward their patients’ potential suffering and their willingness to experiment with human bodies illustrates Larraquy’s broader conviction that our capacity for violence is more readily flexible than we like to believe ... The book is unsettling in its depiction of severed bodies, merciless characters, and ominous dreamscapes. Creating this sense of disturbance seems to be a part of Larraquy’s artistic intent. By unmooring the reader, he creates a reading experience that allows for shock in the face of violence, an increasingly difficult task for an artist. Juxtaposing two disparate stories allows the form to match the disconcerting content ... Heather Cleary does a glorious job at capturing the nuance and the comedy of Larraquy’s language ... By tempering even the darkest of moments of the story with grand metaphors, scathing interiority, and the comically absurd, Larraquy pulls the rug out from under the reader’s despair, humanizing the seemingly inhuman cruelty of its characters.
While the first half of the book is stronger in its narrative cohesion and effect, the second half excels in its experimentation as perspectives, style, and form shift quite fluidly while also creating subtle bridges to the first half ... The language, which Cleary does a remarkable job transforming into English, draws the reader into the story, making him or her complicit in the horror through his or her spectatorship. The consumption of this novel is quick, but the text will inevitably continue to haunt its reader.
...a deeply unnerving and morbidly fascinating novel ... The result is a profoundly strange, often-upsetting account of bodily exploitation in order to push the boundaries of art and science.
The second half is, joltingly, set in 2009 and concerns the reminiscences of a world-famous nine-fingered contemporary artist (the missing finger is part of an installation, of course) ... we’re treated to a pair of surreal gothic tales of science and art, each reaching their convergent point of annihilation. Grotesque, outrageous, and insanely funny, the novel has almost no equal in literature ... Comemadre is the kind of humanistic text that awakens one’s 'inner primate,' an atavism much discussed by the characters. It’s a perverse comfort in the long night of the soul, a horror in the light of the day, and it might even jolt a resigned reader into reappraising some of the things that make literature worthwhile.
...a mutilated novel about the art of mutilating bodies ... an impeccable and quite smart translation by Heather Cleary ... The story is told through the journal of a doctor taking notes on the project. Larraquy’s embodiment of this monstrous figure is wonderfully elegant ... The reader proceeds with a cringing smile that sometimes turns to laughter and sometimes horror ... The second part of the novel, not so masterfully executed as the first but more fun and equally unfiltered and lacerating, simulates a long letter written by a famous, burned-out-but-still-fashionable contemporary artist ... Larraquy confronts this duty with the confidence of an older writer, the fun ingenuity of a prankster, and a singular faith in the powers of irony to ridicule those who misuse power given by the people.
Shuttling between B-movie horror and exceedingly dark comedy, the novel is somehow both genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page—a wickedly entertaining ride.
