Attila

by Aliocha Coll

"My life will not make any sense when Attila is finished," declared Aliocha Coll about his mesmerizing final novel. In this groundbreaking "untranslatable" work, he channels Joycean experimentalism to explore the fragility of empires, the future of the city, and the weight of legacy.

Attila the Hun, reimagined as a visionary leader, contemplates the fate of his people at the gates of Rome. His son, Quijote, is caught between empires and ideals, forced to choose between his father's vision of a Hunnic utopia and the decaying allure of Roman civilization. As Rome burns, Quijote journeys through both real and surreal landscapes, encountering psychedelic visions, mystical revelations, and existential dilemmas.

Quijote's journey blurs the lines between past and future, uniting Biblical, Classical, and Buddhist traditions while moving between planes of existence. Attila is an intricate and elusive masterpiece from the explosive and disorienting imagination of Aliocha Coll, where characters from myth and history intermingle in a stunning labyrinth of allegory and metaphor.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Spanish Literature, Spain, Literature, Literary Fiction, Classics

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Aliocha Coll, seudónimo de Javier Coll Mata (Madrid, España, 6 de mayo de 1948 - París, Francia, 15 de noviembre de 1990),​ fue un escritor español.

Hijo del pintor Xavier Coll Compte, nació en Madrid pero se educó en Barcelona de donde procedía su familia, la cual tuvo una influencia decisiva en sus inquietudes artísticas. Debe su seudónimo a Aliosha, personaje central de Los hermanos Karamazov de Fiódor Dostoyevski, libro que su madre leía durante el embarazo.

Si bien decidió iniciar estudios de Medicina en Barcelona, abandonó la carrera al tercer año y se trasladó a París, donde contrajo matrimonio con la pintora francesa de origen chino Lysiane Luong. En París terminó la carrera de Medicina, ejerciéndola solo los fines de semana a fin de poder dedicar la mayor parte del tiempo a escribir.

Envió sus originales a la agente literaria Carmen Balcells, quien se interesó por su experimentalismo verbal de vanguardia, en la línea de James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Guillermo Cabrera Infante y Julián Ríos. A través de ella entró en contacto con escritores de Madrid como Javier Marías y Jaime Salinas, quienes lo admiraban y a la vez le sugerían que intentara, al menos como pasatiempo, escritos más convencionales.

Coll, que rehuía los ambientes literarios, volvió a París, absolutamente entregado a la literatura y socavado por una fuerte depresión. En 1985 publicó Vitam venturi saeculi y su traducción en endecasílabos de cuatro piezas teatrales de Christopher Marlowe. Su literatura fracasó comercialmente y tres días antes de su muerte le llegó a Carmen Balcells el manuscrito de Atila. Cercado por la depresión y una grave enfermedad, el 15 de noviembre de 1990 se suicidó en París con 42 años. Póstumamente se publicaron Atila (1991) y El hilo de seda (1992).

Permanecen inéditas varias de sus obras: los poemarios Mensiones y Sonetos, el drama Ofelia, Casandra y Juana de Arco, los libros de narrativa Cuarta persona, Antimonio y Aloisio Paramesium, la tesis doctoral Dolor, anestesia y distesia, los ensayos Ética, Epistemología y Estética, el volumen Laocoonte y traducciones de obras de Shakespeare, André Malraux y La anatomía de la melancolía, de Robert Burton.

Carmen Balcells anunció que el 21 de marzo de 2012, de acuerdo a la voluntad de Coll, se daría a conocer su testamento depositado en la Caja de las Letras del Instituto Cervantes.

Reviews

[Chad Post]

Forthcoming from Open Letter next spring alongside ATTILA by Javier Serena, which is a fictionalized version of Aliocha’s life. Friends with Javier Marias—he even wrote “Everything Bad Comes Back” about Coll—Coll wrote complex works that blend philosophy, geometry, myth, and metaphor in a ludic way that’s baffling and intriguing, like a puzzle whose meaning is to be unlocked.

Here’s a smart review: https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com...

[Marc Kozak]

I gave this a good go, but it was mostly incomprehensible to me. I could understand each word, but each sentence eluded me, like it was written in a code only the author could understand. Normally, that is fascinating enough to get me to just sort of go with the linguistic flow, but I couldn't do it this time.

If you're into Joyce and Beckett's more difficult works, you might be down to give this a shot. It's got a very interesting story behind it, and the brilliant Andrei over at The Untranslated gets to the core of it better than I ever could.

I've been vibing with most of the Deep Vellum/Open Letter stuff coming out lately, but this one totally defeated me. I've failed you, Andrei :(

[Alana · Rating 3 out of 5]

i fear i love reading shit like this because there is something deeply wrong with me 💖. another strike against the frontal lobe accusations!

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aliocha Coll’s biographer says that Coll would spend an entire day working on just one sentence.

The sentence:
“The spiral ends enter the sinuses of the faces and fill the mouths and throats forcing the cords and slowing the breath: jklartsgowychdeszxichowyjkszaelnñuxchtaedgrszikjae­iychsxkulywugjxechdsxñgdchywetsrzsrlchjñtsrzrsiouwy­chaxtlogkterwselrstxzñyweochdgsniñnnchgklrstgdywux­zdchktywuoieajtsxnlñzxtsraeiarlgñzxotdjchetxslkidchgj­aowdkgyoywyeñrntchglgjrjnsnñxñszsuaoeixtkyljgzñchnel­wxearrrrrrjrsxgkjziychgjkxtsrgyzjlouwieydnrgstzxschsil­nlnyiuwoañjxtxedtdzrztzuwchjlnerdgjgjkjxñxtiwzdyuyw­jynñgaljrrxxzkzygeartlajlllraeilrsgdñchtritldntjysjchsxowd­drtzkngxñsjchchzdsilgwrurwzschjgdxyiekrrorlwdttgakegyk­dyziuilawlgywiswyjxchtwezaakknydlyoddewwottjguiyches­lslllxeaiwyatgxwrzjychlexwsenywgyñgyaygchñedawgwaw­jajwchlaidrtdyjyasyedwdxadwzchydgtkjzxzzchchssswuwn­oogllgszjagh”

This book is what happens when you view Finnegans Wake as the peak of literature. It’s also one of the world’s longest suicide notes, with the author noping out soon after finishing his years long project. Its obscure prose is impossible to understand yet hard to look away from. Worth reading less as entertainment and more a glimpse into the mind of the local raving hobo or streetcorner preacher who refuses to follow societal norms and is unnaturally dedicated to their peculiar life choices.

[David W · Rating 4 out of 5]

A revisionist, idiosyncratic, concaving, undulatory novel; and even those adjectives feel grossly inadequate.

Best read, I think, as if it were epic poetry (or even a play) rather than prose, especially as it is already littered with stanzic and play-like sections. It's as if Coll transcribed it from an ancient dead language that has no rules of grammar or semblance of logic... that was then further confused by Katie Whittemore's translation (complementary).

By turns alliterative, repetitive, or rhyming, this lyrical reinvention of the histories of Attila the Hun—and his invented son, Quixote, who is in love with a Roman daughter—reads like a reconstruction of The Tempest, with its rival father figures, youthful star-crossed lovers, and willful use of sorcery as multiple pantheons of gods and spirits (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Hunnic, etc.) seem to comment or intrude upon the narrative like a Greek chorus.

A novel that is felt rather than conventionally understood. A bit short of being a winner—but it reads like nothing else out there.

[cycads and ferns]

Attila climbs two steps. He and Thalia holding hands:
"Finally we are born from our children in the majesty of day."
"….Free before our kin."
"We are beyond utopia."
"And because we are on this side of history." "We are in panoramic limbo."
"Because we are present."
"….We hear the substitute's secret passion."
"And we touch the banister of spring running a hand over evening."
"….We sense the wrinkling of celestial bodies."
"And the brush of the wrinkles."
"We feel the leap's contraction."
"….We think the sense that calms the voice."
"The sense of grace."
"….We laugh inwardly at others."
"We laugh the outsides of the allusion."

[Guillermo · Rating 5 out of 5]

«¡Antígona asesina que siembras en cada hombre tu idiosincrasia la historia no es necesaria sino patria la escritura sigue siendo testamento es imposible escribir imposible dejar de escribir la poesía no tiene tío en América. La ética tampoco llegará un día en que esto será una redundancia! Nadie habla algunos escriben. La verdad es que nadie conoce la herencia y por consiguiente su lengua. La moda decanta el genio que decanta la ética que pasa la moda: el
ciclo antigónida».

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tombs of the earth, entombed earth
Sepulchers of the air, air without its rhythm
Air made earth, earth without its rhythm
Pits full of emptiness, not emptied of fullness
Door opening with no door, door with no opening
Opening that opens to the door, door that does not open to the opening
Window open to its closure, closed to its closure
Walled in walls, angleless corner
From walls the corners, walls without faces
Aerial whiteness, aqueous whiteness
Earthy whiteness, neither shining nor matte
That light absorbs, unspectrable white
That resists the prism, larva with no imago
Less than amorphous, barely abstract
Obstract material, aura between curds and whey
Between space and time, breathed without breath
Sweats without pores, and the more cubic
Less locatable, wells whose surfaces
Denude the numen, but not the monad
Fetus registered between wombs, surrounded by uteruses
Evergreen among wombs, full of uterine embryos
Feared by silence, feared by echo and shadow
Just a passable place, and only for the iron
Neither abortionist nor midwife, placental phallus
Sepultures of an idea, common and political
Extensible and estranging, singularly particle
Mausoleums occupied by hermit-like chaos
Garden urns, salted and pressed like angels
Crypts of the vitibund, impermeable to the soul
Pantheons of peasants, or penates of neon
In every era; how they coincide
Urban formations, and military ones
Where the olive tree drops its leaves on the roots
There the owl squints, looming under the while
Arched hypogeums, by the calcining belly
Swine dens, soldiers’ saints
From deboned battles, stretcher-bearers of poor light
Atropolis that hounds, without nature’s vomit
Nor nurture in return, he will not have what there was
Where he will not be what he had been, before tomorrow
And yesterday gone, but never today
Hollow skull expanded, compressed vertebral peak
Skin and flesh and offal, hiding in the marrow
Of the sarcophagal femurs, fortified refuges
In whose foreclosed fervor, souls are revived

- from Coll, Aliocha. Attila.

P.S.: In retrospect, I can only mention that this is the most opaque and indecipherable book I have ever read. The author was raised in Barcelona and then spent several years of his adult life in Paris as a translator of the works of Christopher Marlowe. And it was there that he committed suicide after finishing this, his last and most abstruse work of fiction. A writer with the firm belief that Joyce's Finnegans Wake was the 'starting point' for contemporary literature, and indeed that really shows off in the mode and technique of the narrative. The last few days of his life are depicted in the novel by Javier Serena Attila, which has been recently translated from the Spanish and published together with Coll's book in April 2025. In hindsight, I must say that I never read Wake, and although I am a fan of Joyce, I am yet to read that abstruse tome. That may indeed explain the kind of feeling I have after reading this one and my two-star rating. But, to say the truth, I came out of this in a bewildered state of mind- just because it is so incomprehensible and unclassifiable....

[Trevor Arrowood]

I cannot rate this book. It is too perplexing and far-reaching and hallucinatory to begin to comprehend. It is its own planet with a gravitational pull. I’m pulled in from faraway space, unable to control my own direction. I will think about Attila for decades, and yet, maybe never truly make sense of it…

[Omar Abu Samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

"ولعبتُ اللعبة، منتظرًا إيّاك في نسيان ما كنتُ لا أزال أعرفه عنك، وفي جهلي بأن أعمالي كانت تحتوي إيحاءاتك، بل وربما - وأساسًا - حين كانت تعارض دوافع تلك الإيحاءات؛ في غموض افتراضاتنا المتبادلة وبرودتها، وفي انحسار المبادرة بيننا، ذلك الانحسار الذي راح يفصلنا بهدوء تحت ستار مساعينا والتزاماتنا، فننجرف بعيدًا دون أن نفكّك ذلك الرابط، ونترك رموزنا كفزّاعات مسحورة تعدُ بعودة لا تُصدّق…"

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/tON8oEFT59g

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't ask. I have to think about it.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don't know what to make of this. neither does the translator, or potentially anyone except for aliocha coll, who is dead. i think this is not so much 'unreadable' as avant garde allegedly untranslatable books often are, and more unintelligible. the words on the page themselves aren't that hard to decipher, as in a finnegans wake(which coll thought should be the starting point for contemporary literature, although i don't think it's much of a direct reference point here), but what coll actually means by them is almost always veiled or oblique, if not downright inscrutable. the book tends to oscillate between freeform prose poetry type sections with lots of biological and geometric imagery that remind me of surrealism and maybe some futurism, and philosophical dialogues between characters. there's certain recurring themes in these dialogues that you can vaguely glimpse, like the relationship of a culture and its art to cities, but coll never gives the reader any kind of signposting to make clear what he means. this sometimes has an interesting effect, as when he will describe some mundane movement or action of a character in such an abstract way that it feels like a space alien wrote it, but it's mostly just baffling for a lot of the book. the below passage was one that stood out to me as memorable, insofar as you can retain a book like this in your memory:

"But not long after a deafening silence fell, and two scouts arrived as if on the dregs. Quixote’s grippingly inquisitive gaze eventually coaxed it out of them and as a duet they sang of a marble tumor that had emerged from the earth behind Etzelburg, two triumphal arches holding up an enormous construction whose tympanum finished in two military horns and a trumpet and from whose rooftop rose a tower bristling with archers. Quixote dismissed them without comment and a wave of his hand. After that morning, he expected news like this. Not a clever ingenuity but that vague expectation soon made him think of a Punic elephant. Silence returned, flame-skimming on eagle-owl wings three more rear scouts, who claimed to have witnessed an open fracture of the earth, but upon approaching to observe the bone they had seen a gigantic horse, white as the purest marble of Paros or Carrara, defecating heavily armed soldiers.

Growing groups of riders followed, as alarmed as they were numerous, chanting that the earth bubbled in the wake of Etzelburg, bursting into statues of winged youths brandishing flaming lilies, weeping knights riding winged steeds, men with equestrian bellies and legs lashed by hulking brutes dressed as women, a maiden wrapping her eight sisters and mother in a chest, a virgin deflowered by a serpent, and then in blocks of marble from which emerged tongues, thumbs, glans, mamelons, spoons with handguards, coined olives and breaded coins, and then in blocks of marble from which emerged heels and buttocks and napes, heels and buttocks and napes, heels and buttocks and napes, this report reached him repeatedly until a group of scouts proclaimed that in the Etzelburg’s wake the earth bubbled, bursting into blocks of marble in which heels and buttocks and napes had emerged leaving a dent, and there was even a scout who stood out from the group declaring to have dared to rest his back on one of those molds and found it perfectly congruent: Quixote’s pupils as tiny as if seeing the June sun at noon, caused a general fright, and only his voluminous escort remained with him: “to roll without moving and to roll while moving, what a strange equivocation! What universal compromise was there between all axes and orbits? Why was a man’s life to the chronicle of history what the life of one day was to the chronicle of its longevity? Why did the evening betray the morning? What reason, what portion, and of what thing, abducted midday? What representation, and of what presence, overtook secular gold, personal success, daily journey? The prior essence of what came too soon, declining a century’s zenith, decaying the apotheosis of a biography, diminishing the historicity of a date? What could last longer than its own duration, what other time anticipated chronological time, uranizing it, invaginating it? What antisyphon could siphon chaos in its most saturnine, most providential moments? Perhaps the best occurrence is the greatest vindication of the rudimentary, of the preliminary to the rudiment! the inspired echo of the aspiration to a wail”: right away, a rider arrived from the center of Etzelburg requesting an audience, but Quixote’s guard detained him."

[Tomas Caldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Less a traditional or even experimental novel than a book-length epic prose-poem, as indebted to Homer and Gilgamesh as it is Joyce - a seemingly shapeless and boundless mass of barraging literary/historical/mythic references, false/archaic/fusion/loan-words and literary forms (cycling through the novel, the play, and poems of various styles) - even in the (frequent) moments and swathes in which I found myself unable to parse the meaning, thematic or even literal, of words, sentences, pages, the hypnogogic rhythm and flow of Coll’s language conjures images of their own, arising just from the shape of his syntax, just as music conjures images in the listener, despite being wordless collections of chords, notes, modes, harmonies. Practically demands a second, third read, one with close attention, access to an encyclopaedia and a pencil, but even skating by and leaving with the feeling of having only carved a thin groove into the surface, the obviousness of the book’s greatness lingers regardless.

[pae (marginhermit) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was gripping on Quijote'sconciousness and sanity when I realized...he has gotta be the most unstable element in the book. Great storytelling, I have to flip back and forth to grab the fabric and came back for the frails and laces. Wish I could read this again for the first time.

Piranesi (susanna Clarke) but make it on...datura.

[Guillermo]

Decir que leí Atila es ser franco pero decir que la entendí, siquiera un 20% sería mentir, no había hecho un esfuerzo voluntario por adentrarme en un libro que me costara tanto como este, hay fragmentos muy extensos del libro en donde me he detenido a leerlos en voz alta, y puedo entender de manera individual las palabras, incluso los neologismos que plantea el autor, pero el esfuerzo por concatenar dos o tres palabras con las siguientes palabras muchas veces es sencillamente imposible. Es un libro que abunda en musicalidad, pero es el tipo de libro cuya comprensión cabal creo que escapa incluso a su autor, similar en ese sentido, por decir algo, al Finnegans Wake de Joyce, salvo que en Atila la dificultad no recae en el lenguaje propio sino en el mensaje que intenta transmitir.
Hay, aun así, largos extractos muy bellos: "Solamente hay una forma de amar: ser perfecto. Y sólo lúdicamente se puede ser perfecto". "De cuantas personas nos aman solamente nos sentimos amador por aquéllas que nosotros amamos. El amor de las otras es sigilegio". "Pero aunque no sea hoy, el presente está aquí". "Es la esperanza lo que conserva la vida, no el miedo. El miedo sólo conserva la supervivencia. Has querido conservar el arte históricamente, cuando la poesía conserva artísticamente la historia". "Los frutos del árbol de la vida no hacen ruido al caer".
En fin, no sé plantearme qué puedo opinar sobre esta novela porque valoro mucho su existencia, sobre todo porque está escrito en español y como tal me permite llegar más a fondo de lo que podría si estuviera escrito en cualquier otro idioma, pero es un libro que definitivamente me eludió, pasó casi por completo encima de mi.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

for a few fleeting moments it is amazing and bright and warm like a lucid dream, but the rest is cryptic, experimental, and acid brained noise

[Christopher]

Difficult. Poetry.

[Zola]

sounds like 200 pages of ad-libbed J.A. Seazar lyrics
Despite this I would not recommend this book

[Dan Leiser]

A strange one.
Joyceanesque the second, a frenetic telling of tales that will leave you anxious and uncertain of the path of mainly because the words do not make sense in logic but in emotions. Best read in finnegans wake: in spurts; tandems; not read at all. A play of language to bathe in. At times incredibly coherent and then for pages you’ll have wordplaying into ancient languages and vocabulary you’ve never seen and never will
Again.

[Joseph Murtagh · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5/5

you could probably write a whole phd thesis on interpreting this book. unfortunately i am currently writing a phd thesis and did not have the patience for this one

moments of really nice prose surrounded by text of the author having what felt like a breakdown on the page. doesn’t even have the joy of ireland to help break up the stream of conscious like joyce. why was the word ‘envaginated’ used so much?

[Alonso Penabella · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ocasionalmente puedes decifrar un atisbo de historia dentro de este bonito galimatías sin ningún tipo de sentido más allá de la belleza.

[Nick Cowling]

One of the most bizarre books I have ever read. I cannot properly rate it. Some genuinely fascinating prose and imagery alongside a tsunami of incomprehensible sentences/paragraphs/pages/chapters.

Some actual passages from the book:

"Fleeces of amethyst gas, ripped from green chaparral by the western blush, pirouetted gracelessly in their ascent toward the rust, where an oscillating breath vaporized old blood clots. In its insoluble sulfur, the turquoise-toned sky acted as broiler, which heightened the bitterness of that mired opal. A rose-pink cirrus hung down, more spoiled than broken"

"Shadow rods whisk the sand and apportion a drop of water to each grain: wormless drupes of air or dust: there is almost no time to polish the air. The pipes lay horizontal and disrupt the Etzelburgians: some are found on other men's horses and on some horses a land of the sky. The spiral ends enter the sinuses of the faces and fill the mouths and throats forcing the cords and slowing the breath:
jklartsgowychdeszxichowyjkszaelnnuxchtaedgrszikjaeichysxkulywugjxechdsxngdchywetsrzrlchjntsrzrsiouwychaxtlogkterwselrstxznyweochdgsninnnchgklrstgdywuxzdchktywuoieajtsxnlnzxtsraeiarlgnzxotdjchetxslkidchgjaowdkfyoywyenrntchglgjrjnsnnxnszsuaoeixtkyljgznchnelwxearrrrrrjrsxgkjziychgjkxtsrgyzjlouwieydnrgstzxschsilnlnyiuwoanjxtxedtdzrztzuwchjlnerdgijgjkjxnxtiwzdyuywjynngaljrrxxzkzygeartlajlllraeilrsgdnchtritldntjysjschsxowddrtzkngxnsjchchzdsilgwrurwzschjgdxiekrrorlwdttgakegykdyziuilawlgywiswjxchtwezaakknydlyoddewwottjguiycheslslllxeaiwyatgxwrzjychlexwsenywgyngyaygchnedawgwawjajwchlaidrtdyjyasyedwdxadwzchydgtkjzxzzchchssswuwnoogllgszjagh"

No I did not write that during an earthquake.

All in all, I'm glad I read it. I think I read it.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

this was probably the hardest book I've ever read, and it was not even satisfying. it felt like reading a fever dream of a fever dream. half the book is nonsensical, and the other half is uninteresting. I so badly wanted to like this book, but it quickly became apparent that this was written for the sake of being challenging and convoluted to challenge what literature could be rather than an interesting novel. I believe that the editors felt pressured to let this work be published as is without severe restructuring and cuts primarily due to Coll's suicide soon after finishing the work. I wouldn't recommend, even if you're looking for something challenging and lyrical. Such a disappointment.

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://claracianferotti.substack.com...

[Doug Snyder]

Medium: Love is the school of privileges and freedom is the privilege of this school.

"Of those who love us we only feel loved by those we love. The love of the others is sigilegion," thought the little father, great son, and woman. The willow wept and the aspen quaked. The water nymph fluttered. The saurian's tail broke off and snaking its way upstream it went in search of its tongue. Isis, dumbfounded, had come across a janeirean phallus. Thus rose the morning, following a night when the moon had rekindled mourning and the candles the veil, it rose from the east and from the seer, and both middays converged in the clef of a crescent and snowcapped arch.

(Of the many we love we only feel loved by those who do not love us, said the siphon to the echo)

[]

From the dawn, a blister on the Latin horizon, the sun sprouted green, a cold nail on the blushless blister, unhealthy wound that had not bled, itself light's cauterization of an earth sieved through metal without being cleansed. Contrasting with that violence, that onslaught, the night, detached from the earth on all horizons, serenely retreated from the sky, truth be told, a balm for the eyes, frugality that didn't seem to border the light directly, that seemed to veil itself in situ, the absence of night veiled with the absence of light, in a celestial no-man's land.

It was then that... but wait, where were they coming from? ... the thistle seeds appeared, floating in the southern wind not that they appeared arriving but that they appeared being on the southern wind that blew, which had been blowing all night, gently without gusts or breaks, con-stant, unchanged, and close to the ground... legions of unshakeable thistle seeds tumbling through the air, conveying a loose, leisurely movement... alighting ... landing ... taking off again. The air had a spectral frost, imbued with the saturnine season, the chrysanthemum flock, a shepherd king, who endorses gold in order to draw purple to his breast, the Arcadian king of a migrating sky, flock of stars landing among a flock of kings, the nocturnal chrysanthemums in their manure-dipped boots, dictating laws of love, from autumn to spring, unwitting lovers of peonies, a love assembled without clockworks, interlocked beyond the stoppage and spring, not committed, pledged, captivated, which did not redeem the flaw of its origin but the flaw of its end ... precession of waking in sleep, thistle seed and chrysanthemum, enigma-less visitation.

[Damian Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"That night, Rome saw just one star in the heavens, a dot, neither original nor final, a period beyond the sentence, with no direction or meaning, indeclinable. But the star, the annual ray of the star, only reflected on Rome a terrapin, a dolorous terrapin, in all the adjective's ambivalence, neither transfixed nor affixed, but transfixing and asphyxiating, dolorous for the star and pained for the moon, the absent one, understood, as it were, to be the star."

I began reading this alongside Javier Serena's fictional account of the author, by the same title (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...). While reading the first two chapters, I regarded this book as largely incomprehensible, but then the third chapter brought clarity, which remained to a greater or lesser degree throughout the chapters that followed. Having finished it, I regard this book as a towering masterpiece. While I don't know if it's possible to completely comprehend it in the conventional sense of the term, the text is woven with threads of implicit meaning which, as another reviewer put it, are felt more than understood. It has an internal consistency which is multiply mirrored to form strange and magnificent symmetries. The prose is so lyrical that, even in the densest sections, I found myself eager to push through.

I'm not sure if it's possible to correctly translate a book like this. The translator, in her introduction, expresses total confusion as to the nature of the book. She also mentions something about her "medium", identified only as K, though she claims not to have gone to the trouble of carrying out a ritual invocation of the author. I prefer to think this is a lie, that the book was indeed translated by Coll's weary shade, that the perplexities of English proved too difficult to overcome, and that this translation was written anew from the underworld.

The Untranslated Weblog presents a summary of the narrative, adding some analysis of the complexities of the language in the original work:
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com...

"Let night fall and let the visible mystery be done, the entire curved visible mystery, let the mysterious curvature of everything sensible be made, the secretive binding of the tactile, the pensile division of the audible, the motored oscillation of the tasteable, and the spiral counterbalance of the scentable, the mysterious curvature of everything orientable, dented, embossed only by the insensible mystery. Of all that is dreamable, let dreams be only the mere phantoms of the orientation."

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Likely a part of the canon for White Pseudo-Academics, Faux-Classicists, and readers who think obtuse-with proper literary-cultural references = genius. Or: If you don't get it you're just not smart enough, well-read enough, or one of those who know (of course what "they" know is always rather mundane or utterly useless, mere factoids or specialty jargon, more belief than truth). Anyway. A novel better read at the outset as one would epic poetry, considering its structure, else one can make no sense of the fragments connected, sans punctuation. Or come up with any meaning, honestly. The more prose-ish remainder, albeit interspersed with more poetry-like bits, is a fictional story about, unsurprisingly, Attila the Hun. And yes, there are cutesy mentionings of known people, places, things, and ideas, but that hardly makes a novel novel. Yes, that word has two meanings. How brilliant! More or less sums up my assessment of this book's literary merit. Beg, borrow, and steal, but please don't try to convince me this hasn't been done before, and oh so much more effectively, rather more times than is even necessary. I sense the hoopla is connected less to the output and more to the bio of the author. For me, mysterious hermits with obsessions don't necessarily equal a fascinating narrative. Being a Foucauldian, I tend to analyze sans author, so if a book only works because of who wrote it, well it likely isn't all that, or at least less of what readers are making of it. Opinions vary.
I prefer the companion novel - same title, same publishing house, different tale to tell - by Javier Serena. Fiction also, but the writing is superior.
Superb cover art, zero stars for that, as always.

[Eden Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

the parts that elude me most are the most interesting (every single dreamscape/poem intro had me absolutely lost) and the parts I did understand were unfortunately very cliché and boring. the Romeo and Juliet-esque storyline of fictitious versions of the Roman Emperor (aptly named Rome himself) and Attila the Hun's offsprings amidst a power struggle between Quixote/Hydattila and Attila as the latter plans to retire... I've read versions of this narrative that I've liked better.

I also can't complain that the translation is, at many times, ineffective, because there is straight up gibberish in here and Whittemore sounds like she was roped into this. I will note two trivial parts of the translation I did not like - I think Hydattila and Thalia should have had direct translations of their names instead of phonetic to maintain the wordplay in Spanish (although I don't think it made sense to even name Hydattila that when Quixote's whole "Hydattila" persona came from a desire to differentiate himself from his dad but I digress), and I think some of the nonsense-gibberish noises should have been translated into English (noise making differs in different languages, believe it or not. a vibrating sound would be spelled out differently by an American English speaker and a European Spanish speaker).

Now I do want to read Serena's Attila. :(

[isuhefu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este libro rompe con todo, incluida la relación entre páginas y tiempo. También con los principios de legibilidad, de la semántica y de la lógica. No es para ser comprendido, al menos del todo, sino más bien para ser intuido y sentido.

El argumento está tan lejos del texto que dan ganas de compartir lo que se consigue entender. No lo voy a hacer. Si alguien tiene interés, será mejor para él partir de cero. Solo diré que se ubica en torno a la caída del Imperio Romano de Occidente (poca cosa si se tiene en cuenta su título), aunque también Quijote va a China.

Antes de recopilar información no entendía la relación entre la obra de Mondrian y la de Aliocha Coll que menciona la sinopsis. Ahora ya sí, el romper con lo anterior y el sintetizar en lo elemental, usar conceptos matemáticos y geométricos para replantear todo. Arquitectura, biología, teología, literatura por supuesto, mitología a saco, etc., están también muy presentes.

Por cierto, es un libro muy folletesco, no de folletín precisamente. Folletesco porque hay mucho folleteo. De hecho, la primera vez que descubrí lo que estaba pasando me pareció una genialidad.