The No World Concerto

by A.G. Porta, Darren Koolman (Translator), Rhett McNeil (Translator)

Hailed by Spain's Revista Quimera as one of the top ten Spanish-language novels of the decade, alongside Bolaño's 2666, Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co., and Marías's Your Face Tomorrow, The No World Concerto is a many-layered puzzle concerning an old screenwriter who has holed up in a shabby hotel in a never-named but familiar city in order to write a script about his lover - a young piano prodigy who wants in turn to give up music and become a novelist, and who believes she may be in contact with creatures from another world. Ambition, lust, hate, and the need to create all combine to make up a potent depiction of youth - and age - lost in a labyrinth of their own making.

Sinister and erotic, shifting restlessly between realities, and populated by conspirators both real and imagined, The No World Concerto is an investigation of the limits of language, storytelling, and the known world, set against a backdrop of empty concert halls and hazy foosball bars. It is the first of A. G. Porta's books to appear in English, finally joining those of his early writing partner and devotee Roberto Bolaño.

Genres: Fiction, Spanish Literature, Spain, Music, Contemporary, Literature, Drama

364 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2005

About the author

Antoni García Porta (Barcelona, 1954) obtuvo el premio Ámbito Literario de Narrativa 1984 con el libro Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce, escrito en colaboración con Roberto Bolaño y publicado por Acantilado en 2006. Esta misma editorial ha publicado sus novelas Braudel por Braudel (1999), El peso del aire (2001), Singapur (2003), Concierto del No Mundo (2006), que ganó el premio de novela Café Gijón 2005, y Geografía del tiempo (2008).

Ha sido traducido a diversas lenguas. En 2012, Acantilado publicó Otra vida en la maleta, escrita con Gregorio Casamayor. A finales de 2015 vio la luz Las dimensiones finitas, que da continuidad a su particular universo narrativo.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The No World Concerto is a very solipsistic novel… At times it echoes Project for a Revolution in New York by Alain Robbe-Grillet and sometimes Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino…

Then the girl – she’s probably tired by now, at the point of sleep, but still burning with ambition all the same, still determined to be a writer who’ll accomplish great things. He wonders about the voices in her head, always calling out to her, never silent, and about her persecution complex – like her ambition – ever restless. A thing of little consequence to others, perhaps, but for the screenwriter, at least, it’s a beginning.

Voices in the head… They always tell great stories… They manipulate those who hear them…
He writes a screenplay about the girl and the girl writes a novel about him… And in this The No World Concerto somewhat resembles At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien. They are like two mirrors reflecting each other… They are like M. C. Escher’s lithograph of two hands that are in the process of drawing one another.

Listening to her, the screenwriter starts thinking he should imagine his script not as a series of concentric layers like an onion, but of a series of parallel planes, each successive one subsumed in the next. So where should he situate the girl’s watcher in the shadows? Should he exist in the same world in which she moves, or should he exist in the world she imagines? The plane she calls real, or the one she’s created? He parodies an old controversy, but instead of mathematics, he asks himself whether it was the No World that was discovered or invented. Perhaps he should avoid philosophical polemics and stick to thinking about the story’s subplots and themes, something better suited to a man of his trade. Nothing exists outside our minds – there is only intellectual curiosity, delusion, love.

The novel is a tale of a split personality, a story of a ruined identity… They think about William Shakespeare, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ludwig Wittgenstein and highly intellectual stuff but they write in the bad taste, filling their pages with poor pop culture clichés: aliens, pornographic erotica, crimes, mysterious private eyes, fraud luxury and images of cheap popularity.

The No World is just another way of trying to replace the external world with a replica, but it’s a replica that acts like a photographic negative with an image on it, but which disappears entirely once it’s developed.

Are we real or are we just reflections in the universal mind? “Maybe we’re only information in a microchip, or in a machine that can recreate the past and fabricate the future.”
Are we some algorithmic residue in some alien cosmic computer?

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. The No World is all that is the case.

Composer and expressionist artist Arnold Schoenberg revolutionized 20th-century music through his development of the twelve-tone technique, or dodecaphony, which gives equal treatment to each note in the chromatic scale as the music sways through a series of repeated motifs without allowing any of them to dominate the composition. The No World Concerto is a staggering accomplishment for author A.G. Porta, applying Schoenberg’s music theories to literature as he orchestrates a multi-facet plot rotating through many layers of reality. Following the stories of two unnamed characters, a screenwriter and his lover, a young piano prodigy who abandons her successful career to pursue writing, Porta masterfully composes the effect of ‘two mirrors reflecting each other’ as both characters are creating works based on the lives and interactions of one another. This interaction only furthers the wonderful juxtaposition of the two, one old and one young, yet both grappling with demons of originality and self-expression in a suffocating reality of their own making. Dense with intense philosophic, musical, literary and cinematic explorations and allusions, yet never flagging in the irresistibility of his metafictionally interwoven storylines, Porta achieves his goal of a dodecaphonic novel that both pays tribute to the great, original minds of the past, while simultaneously asserting his own creative genius.

[T]he screenwriter starts thinking he should imagine his script not as a series of concentric layers like an onion, but of a series of parallel planes, each successive one subsumed in the next…Should he exist in the same world in wich she moves, or should he exist in the world she imagines?

A.G. Porta arrived onto the literary scene in 1984 with the novel Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce seguido de Diario de bar, co-written with a young Roberto Bolaño. After a fifteen-year period of literary silence during which he, according to Bolaño, read and reread James Joyce (who features heavily in No World, such as the nod to him with a character named Cousin Dedalus), Porta released a flurry of five novels in ten years. The No World Concerto is his first to be translated into English, and hopefully the first of many.

Porta reveals himself as a master of style, impressively holding the reins on his many layers of reality as he transitions equally between each. The reader is kept unaware if they ever achieve sure footing in reality or another reflection of reality found within the two works. Is it the reality of the screenwriter, the reality of the girl, or an interpretation written by one or the other.

The story is his own invention, but he knows he borrows heavily from the girl, from the stories she tells him, from the extracts of her novel she reads to him or that get delivered to his hotel, with commentaries scribbled in the margins, which he incorporates into his own narrative.

Much of what either character writes comes from something they’ve observed or heard from the other, or they attribute to their characters the ideas burdening their own thoughts. This repetition of ideas, revolving through perspectives, further simulates the twelve-tone theory, and each layer of reality, each theme and motif, is given equal expression. The effect is marvelous and disorienting, yet not to the point of distraction, and it is awe-inspiring how Porta’s delivery manages to be concise, accessible and seemingly effortless.

The repetition of themes, ‘a world of pure contrast between dissonance and harmony, in which pleasure is derived merely by finding different ways of resolving the conflict,’ offers an interesting, phenomenological approach to each idea. As much of what the reader learns about the girl is found through the script being written by the screenwriter—similarly, the major insights into the screenwriters present condition are revealed through the girls fictional character’s backstory—the reader develops an understanding with her nature that may not take any basis in her reality, yet it is all the reader has to build on. Each subsequent action of hers cannot be viewed without carrying with it the previously constructed notions of her, and this uncertainty casts an alluring enigmatic shroud around the character of the girl. There is, in fact, the girl herself, in pure form, which we can never meet since we can only know her as our own unique perspective of her, and the screenwriters perspective on her. Furthermore, it could be argued that she can only know her own perspective on herself, carrying with it her own preconceived notions and sensitivity towards certain aspects as well as blinders towards others. As with each idea or expression or thematic motif that is viewed repeatedly but applied differently, Porta probes the thing-in-itself with each attempt opening a different, subjective reality of impressions about the idea.

What really matters is not the object in itself, whether it exists objectively, so to speak, but the fact we can perceive it at all, and perception, being subjective, is as multifarious as the number of people that comprise the human race.

The juxtaposition between the screenwriter and girl is further intensified as each is primarily displayed as an expression of the other. ‘Youth is that condition of being without a past; old age, of being without a future.’The screenwriter is caught in a maze of perceived failures, feeling his life is brimming with mediocrity in a profession long past it’s golden age. This mourning for a golden age causes him to often reflect on Marcel Proust (in his script, Proust is the girl’s fathers favorite author), and opens an interesting observation into the nature of solipsism, a theme that permeates the novel.

his yearning, is symptomatic of a man who’d have mourned the loss of any age, any time, because the only thing that truly vanishes is the self located there, located then, so the narrator interprets the end of his age as the end of the self, and the end of the self as end of world entire.

When we find ourselves disconnected from the present, we often feel it has less value since it has less value to us. The screenwriter fears being forgotten, being an unvisited grave in the cemetery full of innovators, and his choice of a star on the rise as his protagonist speaks volumes of his desire to be relevant. The girl, on the other hand, rejects her fame and only wishes ‘to be authentic, to be true to herself.’ She rejects her school band, of which she is the star, when she fears they are selling-out, playing a game that leads to fame but not to be true to the music they play, to be another brand name (exemplified in her wardrobe consisting of only white clothing that has had the tags removed). Porta exploits the rebellious teen cliché well, and the girl is the embodiment of the quest for the thing-in-itself while rejecting any imitations. Unlike the screenwriter who studies the great minds of literature to be overwhelmed by their greatness, she views them as a mark to match with her own greatness, such as her interpretation of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Piano . She abandons piano to write, to create her own worlds in which she can explore her inner theories that nothing exists, or at least not beyond her own mind.

For the girl, or at least from what may only be the screenwriters perspective of the girl, everything is a game. This statement becomes a mantra for her and her fellow band members, the young conductor and brilliant composer¹. The group frequents bars with foosball tables, and since soccer (it seemed unnecessary that fútbol was translated as ‘soccer’) is the favorite sport of the girl—having a controversial soccer star as her favorite player being a further expression of her inner nature—, it is only fitting she would enjoy a task that makes a further game out of the sport and put each player under her command. Life is a game where they control their pieces to achieve what they want, and literature becomes an outlet that satisfies the desire for creativity and control. The screenwriter fears he only creates ‘to live the lives of his characters, being that only exist in his dreams, people he’d like to be.’ On the other hand, the girl creates to assert control over the ideas in her head, her notion of the No World, ‘a name for an all-encompassing thought, the thought of which all things ultimately consist,’ which she tries to piece together a logical depiction of through the style of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. ‘5.6 The limits of language mean the limits of the no world.’ Her No World is the metafictional novel found in the novel, and one that best examines the Porta’s own mechanics (it should be mentioned again that her works may only be a product of the screenwriter’s imagination, or is the screenwriter’s works only a product of her story, ad infinitum).

[I]n the explosion, thoughts began expanding outward, creating a universe that exists only within its own solitude, although it appears so real that it eventually created beings who were convinced it was real, that they were real, and so convinced were they, it was inconceivable to even admit to the possibility that all they saw around them, all they knew and loved and hated, was only a product of thought. These beings eventually thought other universes into existence…always refusing to admit to the possibility that the constantly expanding universe they lived in was just a mind that thought them into existence.

There is examination of extreme solipsism, and the idea that ones creations can further create their own realities, all of which pulls the reader deeper down the rabbit hole of the multi-layered realities of the two characters continuously creating one another.

In a work about originality and the genius of former figures in the arts, it is understandable that the reader would look to the book at hand to uphold the same level of creative genius. The ideas found within The No World Concerto aren’t particularly new, many of which are the solipsistic quandaries turning over in the minds of college students as they sit motionless, staring into what seems like a void in their smoky dorm room, yet it is the strikingly refreshing style that threads each idea together that more than makes up for it. When discussing the great authors, such as Joyce and Proust— there are very few proper nouns in the book and these two are only referred to as ‘he writer who revolutionized twentieth-century literature’, and the latter as ‘the novelist and cartographer of memory—the father tells the girl that they are remembered because they took what had come before them and completely revolutionized it. There are ideas in their works that have been seen before, but not executed with the all-encompassing brilliance as in their works. The screenwriter and the girl are both plagued that their ideas are not original, and that it is near impossible to come up with a completely original idea unattached from comparison with another already-done, and already-done-well idea (the girls first description of her No World with people being unaware they are aliens reminds her cousin of Leon Kowalski of Blade Runner ), yet they reassure themselves that if they handle their collection of less-than-original-ideas flawlessly, then the totality of the work will shine forth as a work of brilliance. Porta may be asserting his own self-assurances here, yet he undoubtedly has earned the right.

Spiraling and metafictionally marvelous, Porta’s The No World Concerto was some of the most fun I’ve had reading a book in years. The book is not without it’s faults, particularly that Porta often gives a heavy-handed explanation of his philosophical issues and mechanics (however, the idea that it is the opposite character trying to verbalize the others ideas so they can in turn understand them is warranted justification) and that the shocking plot twists near the end seem to be unnecessarily sensational (yet, if the book is really a screenplay, then Hollywood plot twists to spice things up are another possible justification), yet No World’s brilliance hides the flaws in it’s shimmering glare. The parallel planes of plot are exceptionally engaging and the reader is more than happy to drown beneath their churning back and forth, each one receiving equal validity in the novel’s reality. Porta is a maestro, conducting his many threads together to form a fantastic literary expression of the twelve-tone theory, and keeping the reader eagerly turning pages without feeling overwhelmed by the wonderful immensity of what they hold in their hands.
4.5/5

‘Would a mind that creates itself and everything else still have need of success and recognition? It would requite a superhuman effort at self-deception.’

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

antoni garcía porta is a spanish novelist with some half dozen novels to his name. the no world concerto (concierto del no mundo) is the first of his works to be translated into english (and hopefully not the last). he is best known to english-speaking readers (if, in fact, he is known to them at all) as roberto bolaño's early writing partner and long-time friend. in 1984, they published an as-yet untranslated short novel they coauthored together, consejos de un discípulo de morrison a un fanático de joyce (advice from a morrison disciple to a joyce fanatic). despite winning a literary award for their work, porta did not publish another book for well over a decade following, while bolaño set about writing in earnest. bolaño claimed that porta spent these intervening years reading and rereading james joyce: "he'd read everything by joyce and in fact his subsequent long silence is in some way a product of his reading. i remember that for many years he wrote or collected random sentences from ulysses with which he assembled poems that he called readymades, à la duchamp. some were very good."

the no world concerto, like many of its unnamed (never named) characters, is an enigmatic, chimerical work of fiction. portentous, suspicious, obsessive, prurient, and paranoid, porta's story is undoubtedly a singular effort. set in modern-day paris (but referred to only ever as "the neighboring country's capital"), the no world concerto follows the fates of an aging screenwriter as, with savings dwindling and deadlines looming, he feverishly strives to compose a script. the subject of his screenplay is also his young, precocious, and talented lover - a gifted pianist who'd rather spend her time aspiring to novel-writing than practicing or performing concerts. estranged from his wife (or worse), the screenwriter's efforts become ever more frenzied and desperate as the object of his amorosity finds herself entangled in something she strives to understand as best she's able.

imbued with veiled philosophical, musical, and literary references, porta's novel has a rhythmic, almost undulating quality to it - filled as it is with recurring imagery and repetitive phrasings. also infused with a joycean nod, the no world concerto even features a character named dedalus. within the novel, consistent with porta's decision to forgo names almost entirely, joyce is referred to, often, as "the writer who revolutionized twentieth-century literature," proust as "a novelist and cartographer of memory who turned jealousy into an aesthetic of stolen time," cervantes as "a novelist who lacked the use of one arm," shakespeare as "the dramtist who set the literary standard for everyone," and wittgenstein simply as "w." even secondary characters and settings get similar treatment: "the brilliant composer," "the young conductor," "the hotel with the english name," etc. never do these literary choices, however, come across as banal or affected; instead they seem a way for porta to enhance the shroud-like quality, mystery, and ambiguity of his narration.

leitmotifs abound throughout the no world concerto, be they phrasings, themes, or imagery. secondary or ancillary characters and ideas enrich the tale greatly, and any reader is likely to be as intrigued by the notion of aliens, extraterrestrial communication, the "no world," an awol soccer star, a captured terrorist, dodecaphony (and schoenberg), and hypnotism, as they are by the main plot involving the screenwriter and the girl. a sensual, sinister quality pervades so much of the text, that it makes for both a constant foreboding and a charged sexuality that combine for a most erotic effect.

what is perhaps most alluring about the no world concerto (and there is much to be seduced by) is the seemingly effortless ways in which porta is able to maneuver between realities. the reader is never quite certain whether what he or she is reading is part of the story itself, an authorial aside, a portion of the screenwriter's script, or an excerpt from the girl's novel-in-progress. characters transcend each of these worlds, almost as if they are living within parallel universes that may or may not correspond to the "real" one. free from pretension, the no world concerto is almost anti-metafiction, so easily does porta offer his nuanced tale. with direct, often staccato prose, porta's novel is never arduous or even all that heady. its challenge (if it even has one) lies in confronting a work of such originality and creativity. interpersonal games, relationships, age, success, stories, sex, and even violence are all considered within. a.g. porta's the no world concerto may well be unlike any other contemporary novel, but the reticence to offer that pronouncement is solely on account of how fluently porta convinces us of his tale - and, by extension, the prodigiousness of his literary gifts.

sometimes he asks himself if he isn't writing screenplays to live his life through his characters. the mind is filled with strange things, he reflects, content with this ambiguous response. but if this truly was his reason for writing, it would mean he's wasted his life. there are so many people who dedicate their efforts to doing something useful, he thinks, like making cars, refrigerators, knives, bread... while others are working in the dream industry. they don't make anything that's real; all they do is provide opportunities for people to dream their lives away by living in fictional realities that are depicted onscreen or in a book. it's no different than providing drugs, narcotics, to both divert and stupefy the public at the same time. in turn, he thinks, these creators of dreams, whether through screenplays or novels, are dreaming themselves in the act of writing, so it seems the lie goes full circle.

*translated from the spanish by rhett mcneil (lobo antunes, tavares) and darren koolman (poet & translator). interestingly, the no world concerto was originally slated for a late 2011 release, but was never published. it appears as though mcneil began rendering duties, but, for whatever reason, was unable to finish them, hence darren koolman's involvement in concluding the translation. koolman offers a brief preface about porta and the no world concerto.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1984, in collaboration with Roberto Bolaño, A.G. Porta published a novel with the enigmatic title Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joycean Fanatic”. Although it was well-received and won prizes, Porta went into a literary silence for more than a decade. Oh, he wrote, but didn’t publish till later. What he largely did, though, was read and re-read James Joyce obsessively, when he wasn’t reading Proust or Wittgenstein. He already had what his translator calls a “megatextual” style. So you might expect this novel, which Porta began in 1994 and finished eleven years later, to be a little weird. And you’d be right. Which makes it a little hard to review. But here goes.

There is a No World Symphony in this novel but not a No World Concerto. I don’t think that’s important. The music is a twelve-tone composition and it mirrors a book that is being written with a No World theme. That’s variously defined, but think extraterrestrial, as in not of this world. A dream world, an illusion, I don’t know.

There is something of a plot here but it is described within by the author as one mirror looking at another mirror. If that helps. Oh, you want actual stuff that happens? Well, the novel opens with an older screenwriter arriving at a hotel in the neighboring country’s capital. He’s there to write a screenplay which, it seems, he finds impossible to write at home. He promises himself that he will telephone his wife daily. Make that two times daily. He does indeed call her (five rings) but she never answers.

The screenplay, I think, is about a lovely sixteen year-old piano prodigy who wants to be a writer. There actually is a lovely sixteen year-old piano prodigy who wants to be a writer who is having sex with the old screenwriter. She was a student in his writing class. The novel the girl is writing is about a professor having sex with a student, and about extraterrestrials, and about the girl’s own adventures. She feeds these vignettes to the old screenwriter who maybe incorporates them into his play. So that mirror to mirror thing. Got it?

A gun is introduced, and you know what Chekhov said. Indeed, Porta tells us to watch, that it will eventually go off. But while I’m waxing Chekhovian, why doesn’t the screenwriter’s wife answer the damn phone?

Perhaps I’ve made this all sound overly complex. If so, I apologize. My only defense is that it’s actually overly complex. But all a treat, nevertheless.

And what a wonderful cover!

[Aravindakshan Narasimhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

If one has to condense whole book in few lines, it will be like:

A writer/teacher writes a script about his student writing a novel about her teacher and she writes about her teacher writing about her, writing a novel about her teacher. Ad infinitum!

Aged, semi retired screenwriter writes about his student, who is also a piano prodigy, aged 16, giving performances on aleatory pieces, but feels vacuous, thinks writing is her vocation, reads the old bard, reads W the philosopher/logician, the writer who wrote only one Magnum opus, thinks she wants to incorporate the experimental musical structure to her writing called dodecaphony, muses on universal language, maths or music?, reveries on philosophical problems of mind, but writes not about sophisticated stuffs, but on cheesy b grade scenarios, sex with an old professor, alien calling her out, mysterious person following her, screenwriter writing about her, having sex with her, left his wife long back, sinister plot, almost non existent producer financing the screenplay, alien organisation scheming against the girl, shenanigans: mother, father, cousin dedalus, some mister Gregory, but she finds out finally the solution when we know what's gonna happen.


The problem with the book is after a point it kinda repeats itself ( repeating is obvious here, since it is like Sorrentino's work), in the middle it wasted a lot of pages without moving anywhere and also once we predict the technic of this book we kinda feel aloof. Only towards the end it kind of gains its initial promise, but by then we know what to expect clearly!

One of my friends here as said it simply:

It is like 2 individuals/writers keep holding mirrors to each other for feeding each other.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be a fascinating, highly literary, and ultimately disturbing book. It's advisable to suspend most normal sensibilities when reading this, i.e. toward the old screenwriter's exploitative passion for "the girl," a very young and unnamed piano prodigy. But that's not too hard to do since it's never easy to tell what is supposed to be real. He writes about her in an unnamed city, her unsavory relationships with her fellow musicians, her desire to give up music and become a writer. She, in turn, writes about her alternate "No World," where the screenwriter is represented as an old professor who hunts aliens. Some of the elements that are most clearly part of the fiction-within-a-fiction are some of the most enjoyable, such as the college-age prostitute, patronized by the girl's father, who collects the first lines of famous books. At yet another level of fictional construction are the continual (and elliptical) references to Joyce and Wittgenstein, among others. This shifting surrealism isn't off-putting, but I nonetheless finished the book feeling queasy. The world of The No World Concerto is often a cruel and anomic one.

[Forrest · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not nearly as clever or insightful as I would have hoped. The hype is lost on me.

[Marc Nash · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting premise, two people in a relationship, both are writers penning stories involving the other, so that at any moment the narrative may be reflected in any one of several prisms, the reality of their relationship, his narrative about her, her narrative of him, them coming together to discuss each's narrative, or criticise the other's etc. The book reminded me of Robbe-Grillet's novels, in how they structure and mark the passage of time which almost becomes the highest value of the narrative, as a lot of what the characters do is occupy themselves, or fill time (not writing, ie procrastinating). But this does make for a dull read. There is little narrative drive or energy until towards the end when there is a surprising reveal about the male character, but then the denouement is one I spotted would be coming a long time before it did and when the reader is ahead of the writer the book is in trouble. So for all its premise, ultimately rather a tedious slog I'm afraid.

[Peter Aronson · Rating 2 out of 5]

At first this book drew me in. Then it became something of a slog. Then it became a seriously slow slog through the unconvincing and uninteresting life of its characters. Then the book turned kind of disturbing, and finally there was a fairly neat ending. But by the time that ending came I had slogged through so much uninteresting stuff that it failed to redeem the book. The prose was OK, but not (in English) anything special, the characters mere caricatures, and the techniques (like never naming anything but rather describing it) pretentious, and after a while, annoying. Overall, meh.

[Wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

An aging professor leaves his post in disgrace, and takes up his former career as a screenwriter. Once he settles in and begins work on a new screenplay, he meets the girl who was at the center of his affair. She is a talented concert pianist, playing the experimental work of a brilliant composer, but she chafes at the demands of the composer, the young conductor, and her own business-minded mother. One night, she, the composer, the conductor, and the screenwriter visit a hypnotist who convinces her she is a great writer herself, and so she begins her own work, but she must face her fears of being followed, her father’s remoteness though they live in the same hotel room, her on-again, off-again visits to the screenwriter, the composer, and the conductor, and her belief that there are no coincidences, that life is a game.

I really liked this strange work - no one is named throughout, and the repetition of phrases, images, and even scenes has an accumulative affect that somehow manages to push the story along. The author is a friend of Roberto Bolano, so the challenge is there.

[Strange Weather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent over a year reading you, dear book. I savored and savored.

This is good writing. This is twisted plot. This is sometimes more philosophy than plot. <3

[Echo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book overstays its welcome by a little bit, but the structure is a brilliant piece of work. The narratorial point of view can change midsentence, it's nearly like watching that rotating dancer illusion. 7/10.

[dc · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is intricate and masterful. It starts quietly and ends with a bit of a thud, though. It really got started for me around page 200, and, from there, held me captivated until the end. I have a feeling some of it was, as they say, lost in translation.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Hailed as one of the top 10 Spanish-language book of the decade."
In the modernist spirit of James Joyce. A story within a story within itself. Absorbing.
Kept Attention: 5
Must Read: 5
Accessible: 3
Important: 5 (as literature)
Well-written: 5

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is crazy good. It slumps and sags a bit in the middle--and really demands a lot from the reader--but the ending and overall concept makes for a very rewarding read. Highly recommended if you enjoy Bolaño, Sebald, Ben Lerner's stuff, et al. Metafiction for the win.

[Arlo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not overwritten, but definitely "over thought." The idea is ambitious, but I don't think he pulled it off- structurally. Porta tries to draw parallels between writing and music composition. 12 tones etc.



Another book I wish I would of quit half way through but soldiered on to the end.

[Scott Morrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely well written, not sure I entirely understood it...