From renowned Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll, a novel about the unsettling space between identities, and a disturbing portrait of dementia from the inside out.
A manic treatise on travel and transformation ... for a novel guided by delirium, Lord is remarkably suspenseful and assured. Darkened by reflections on death and visions of failure, the novel makes depressive comedy from displacement. Even the cover strikes a visual rhyme with its beat-up bowler hat, a nod to Beckett.
... absolutely unsettling...both in the ways that it depicts alienated psyches and in the ways that it disorients the reader ... summons tension due to its sheer indescribability—as the reader is forced to question whether this ambiguity is in the service of some larger plot revelation, or if the ambiguity itself is the point ... To say that this novel operates under dream logic would be to sell it short: It has a distinctly surreal logic, but 'dreamlike' isn’t the first word that comes to mind when thinking of it. Still, the blend of precision and abandon with which Noll spins this tale is never less than disconcerting. The result is a novel that creates new rules and surveys new fictional terrain as it goes.
... the book is short, less than two hundred pages, but contains no chapter or section breaks for the reader or the narrator to catch their breath. Scenes change quickly, and there are several hours- or days-long time jumps, often in a single paragraph. This fast-paced structure feels intentional, however, or at least matches the urgent tone of the book. As the narrator’s mind is unraveling, he spends a lot of time wandering the city without motivation or destination. In matching this purposelessness, the story swirls and loops in increasingly unpredictable and nonsensical patterns, following the narrator on his delirious wanderings ... This is a book driven more by philosophical and thematic questions than it is by narrative impulse. Nonetheless, Lord is engaging, if not always intuitive or understandable. There are multiple scenes to make you gasp ... reminiscent of Lynchian and Kafkaesque traditions, physically trim but intellectually overflowing; though perhaps best enjoyed with a healthy appetite for confusion, Lord is delicious: provocative and evocative and unforgettable.
