The plot lines in Trufflepig are funhouse mirrors, reflecting the horrors of both our history and our headlines ... But it’s the narrative that delights. When so much fiction feels like elegant dioramas, like masterfully crafted ships in bottles, Trufflepig feels organic and amorphous, like some biological organism, shape-shifting its way through the literary landscape, leaving a thin ribbon of goo in its wake. The plot is beside the point. There is a world to be discovered here. In Trufflepig, Flores takes the well-worn, time-honored tradition of the psychedelic-sci-fi-punk-western-horror-noir and turns it on its ear. The psychological, the spiritual, and the political all intertwine in a cicatrix pattern ... Trufflepig is a narcocorrido for the Island of Dr. Moreau. It’s Roberto Bolaño and Gloria Anzaldúa dropping acid and staring into the desert sun. It’s a metaphysical detective story about genocide, corruption, and families ... Tears of the Trufflepig is funny and thrilling and tragic. Loose and sometimes unwieldy, yes, but also mesmerizing and ambitious.
Flores expertly lampoons the narcotraficante predilection for exotic collecting and baroque violence. But his bigger target is authenticity fetishism, the backward-looking, vinyl-loving, locavore culture that distracts, like Nero’s fiddle, from natural and social disaster ... Fraught with confusing metaphors and expository dialogue, Tears of the Trufflepig is an uneven debut, inconsistently fulfilling the promise of its brilliant, madcap conceit. But Flores has such a distinctive, irresistibly strange sensibility that I almost didn’t care—better half-baked genius than exquisitely turned mediocrity. The novel delivers where it counts...
Though Bellacosa’s longing for his deceased wife and daughter lures him toward death and to the trufflepig’s promise of sweet dreams, he doesn’t enter this underworld so much as drop into it. He follows one eccentric story after another, landing in situations that, in Flores’ vivid settings, blend noir with magical realism ... Holding on to the many, many threads Flores winds around Bellacosa can, however, be a big job for the reader. Intricacy runs close alongside chaos ... His quest may be meandering and bizarre, nightmarish and heart-rending, but the journey is well worth taking.
It’s not that easy to summarize Fernando A. Flores’ novel Tears of the Trufflepig until it is. At first gloss, the story seems surreal and futuristic — until it doesn’t. Given that Flores began writing this novel in 2014, many of the details seem not political but prophetic. He understands the border in the way that many who come from there do — those who have left and developed a perspective about it from new vantage points ... This is an intelligent book. Literary, musical and historical references fill each chapter. It is a smorgasbord of cultural allusions that make up a kind of playground for readers who don’t offhandedly eschew what readers of world literature welcome, including the surreal elements.There’s another point worth making. Anyone who thinks that writers from South Texas have a limited worldview are just plain wrong.
The novel unfolds in cinematic detail, but only truly gets going after the illicit dinner, about a third of the way into the book. In the dinner party scene, Flores’s full talents for humor and surrealism are on display, and these are rare, remarkable talents akin to those possessed by Roberto Bolaño .... Flores manages to produce...a narrative that is hilarious and wonderfully weird, rather than scolding ... The overarching effects of Tears of the Trufflepig suggest a contemporary punk analog to Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist movement in poetry— an anti-bourgeois movement in which 'Even the heads of aristocrats can be our weapons'. Flores’s sentences are vivid and lively, and the vision is tremendous, psychedelic, blazing. Readers in search of the delights of hallucinatory language and humor and radical thinking will find in Tears of the Trufflepig pure pleasure.
... while Tears of the Trufflepig details a scabrous alternate version of the border region, it eventually inhabits a strange, dreamlike landscape of mystical encounters and psychedelic visions. The hallucinatory ending is right out of Pynchon and will leave readers of this breakout work thrilled and disoriented in equal measure.
The continued pounding and re-pounding of contemporary Mexican strife may be the book’s drawback, but Flores’ creativity in rehashing each unfavorable part of Mexican society—paranoia, corruption, impunity, fear of highway robbers—and mixing it with cultural pride often saves Trufflepig from political screed. But Flores, a South Texas-born writer known for publishing against the grain...is easily the author to break the mold of traditional, staid Latin magical realism. He mixes together a mulligan’s stew of Border Wall policy, Tejana markets and Norteño characters, doing so under the auspices of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Valeria Luiselli. In short, if Trufflepig tells us anything in its 322 pages, it’s that the U.S.-Mexican Border will always be anything except 'real' ... If there’s one book to take to the border, to read passages of aloud on both sides, I think that Flores’ debut would hold up well.
Flores’s delirious debut never quite delivers on its imaginative premise ... Flores’s novel is jam-packed with excitement, but his inability to prioritize his ideas prevents them from cohering into a credible vision of dystopia. Despite this, Flores’s novel shows he has talent and creativity to spare.
... an alt-/near-/quasi-/somewhat dystopic- future that is funny and weird, but with a dark undertow of social commentary that will keep it unspooling in your mind after you finish reading ... Bellacosa is one of my favorite protagonists in a while ... Flores is quite good at skewering the guest of the party without falling into clichés of how the superrich behave—or fail to behave ... Flores gives us a near-future that is often fun and rollicking, but he’s never afraid to show us the reality that is all-too-close to the world we’re living in right now.
Stacked with other striking images and clever details, like the three canyon-sized concrete barriers that separate the U.S. from Mexico (and still fail to curb migration), this wildly imaginative, highly addicting, and ultimately endearing speculative first novel offers borderlands storytelling with an sf twist.
... certainly deserves its place alongside Warren Ellis and Jeff Vandermeer, with a rustic patina that nods to the likes of Jonathan Lethem’s well-worn detectives ... Plotwise, the novel is seriously circuitous, but Flores’ rich characterizations, sparing prose, and vivid portrayal of the myths of Mexican culture and life along the border give what could have been a tinder-dry crime novel a strange whimsy and charm that don’t sound like anything else in genre fiction ... A dryly philosophical, colorful, and disorienting thriller about grief, survival, and undead animals.
