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Fresh, Green Life
A study of interiority and inferiority, written in the vein of Lars Iyer and Ben Marcus, that takes place over the course of a single, snowy night
After resigning from an adjunct teaching position, our narrator Sebastian Castillo, who shares a name with our author, Sebastian Castillo, and also with a translated Spanish writer, Sebastián Castillo, resolves to spend an entire year without speaking, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos.
But, come New Year’s Eve, Sebastian (the narrator)—whose rich interiority in precontemplation alone is curiously and addictively easy to read—will break his silence by accepting an invitation to the home of a former professor for a reunion amongst his cohort, one decade after graduating. This invitation surely would have been ignored if not for the promised attendance of Maria, Sebastian’s former classmate and love interest. What follows is an inexplicable series of fascinating events charting the erosion of young, male hope.
Inside a world with a peripheral understanding of Rilke, Descartes, Kant, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, and more, Castillo has written a short epic that is curiously addictive and unexpectedly delightful. FRESH, GREEN LIFE is a meditation on literature, academia, and philosophy; a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future; and a compact miracle of the fake-real.
After resigning from an adjunct teaching position, our narrator Sebastian Castillo, who shares a name with our author, Sebastian Castillo, and also with a translated Spanish writer, Sebastián Castillo, resolves to spend an entire year without speaking, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos.
But, come New Year’s Eve, Sebastian (the narrator)—whose rich interiority in precontemplation alone is curiously and addictively easy to read—will break his silence by accepting an invitation to the home of a former professor for a reunion amongst his cohort, one decade after graduating. This invitation surely would have been ignored if not for the promised attendance of Maria, Sebastian’s former classmate and love interest. What follows is an inexplicable series of fascinating events charting the erosion of young, male hope.
Inside a world with a peripheral understanding of Rilke, Descartes, Kant, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, and more, Castillo has written a short epic that is curiously addictive and unexpectedly delightful. FRESH, GREEN LIFE is a meditation on literature, academia, and philosophy; a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future; and a compact miracle of the fake-real.
160 pages, Paperback
First published June 24, 2025
33 people are currently reading
4055 people want to read
About the author
Sebastian Castillo
4 books57 followersSEBASTIAN CASTILLO is a writer and teacher living in Philadelphia. He was born in Caracas, Venezuela and grew up in New York. His work has appeared in NY Tyrant, Peach Mag, Electric Literature, The Fanzine, BOMB, and elsewhere. He is the author of 49 Venezuelan Novels (Bottlecap press, 2017), NOT I (word west, 2020), and SALMON (Shabby Doll House 2023).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 128 reviews
November 10, 2025
i follow sebastian castillo on twitter and find him pretty funny, so i'm sad to report his novel was not nearly as fun to read.
two things worked against him here (yes, this is largely a matter of personal taste): the satire and the internet. i find both to be incredibly difficult to tackle in a way that doesn't feel heavy-handed, or eye-rolling, or just kind of gauche. the internet, in fresh, green life, was the latter. i just didn't find the instagram interludes or the "ruminations on my unrequited crush thirst-trapping" sections interesting or novel. i understand WHY these bits were there, but they did nothing for me.
the satire wasn't terrible, or unconvincing (it would be hard to call any caustic depiction of the modern man unconvincing at this historical moment), but it wasn't exceptional or particularly clever. i didn't find much to grab onto in the way of voice or prose, and satire can make a novel's character-writing a bit of a chore (all these characters are tasked with the double bind of representing a kind of sociocultural commentary on masculinity/gender/desire/academia/labor/place/etc.) unless you're like, don delillo.
i don't doubt that there are washed up male artistés (read: failsons) who peaked during their MA/PhD and need to hear what is said in this novel. similarly, i don't doubt i was the wrong audience for this book. simply put, it didn't do anything for me. i do continue to find the meta-referential contours of fiction by latam writers charming, and castillo's 49 venezuelan novels sounds more up my alley, so maybe i'll give that a shot.
two things worked against him here (yes, this is largely a matter of personal taste): the satire and the internet. i find both to be incredibly difficult to tackle in a way that doesn't feel heavy-handed, or eye-rolling, or just kind of gauche. the internet, in fresh, green life, was the latter. i just didn't find the instagram interludes or the "ruminations on my unrequited crush thirst-trapping" sections interesting or novel. i understand WHY these bits were there, but they did nothing for me.
the satire wasn't terrible, or unconvincing (it would be hard to call any caustic depiction of the modern man unconvincing at this historical moment), but it wasn't exceptional or particularly clever. i didn't find much to grab onto in the way of voice or prose, and satire can make a novel's character-writing a bit of a chore (all these characters are tasked with the double bind of representing a kind of sociocultural commentary on masculinity/gender/desire/academia/labor/place/etc.) unless you're like, don delillo.
i don't doubt that there are washed up male artistés (read: failsons) who peaked during their MA/PhD and need to hear what is said in this novel. similarly, i don't doubt i was the wrong audience for this book. simply put, it didn't do anything for me. i do continue to find the meta-referential contours of fiction by latam writers charming, and castillo's 49 venezuelan novels sounds more up my alley, so maybe i'll give that a shot.
June 27, 2025
read an interview in which he said he tries to write 1500 words a day, and a tweet in which he said this is 30,000 words. so in theory that’s a novel in 20 days. i could do that. should i do that? really liked this. want to be sebastian castillo (the author) very badly, and fear becoming sebastián castillo (the character), though i think it’s likely. as a recent philosophy grad it was like seeing my life stretching out ahead of me
July 11, 2025
This may have the most clever use of "tatterdemalion" I've ever seen.
August 9, 2025
On 17 July 2025, Sebastian Castillo tweeted:
i have to come clean: i have never read a single word written by thomas bernhard. i just sort of imagined what his books were like and went from there. sorry for the pain this might cause
following up when the replies missed the irony:
to clarify: i've read 9 books by bernhard. but then i entered a machine that makes you forget the novels written by thomas bernhard, which happened just before i wrote my book. a guy on the street made me do it, he invented this machine. so basically i haven't read him. sorry
Only 9? Slacker!
But this novel combines influences including Bernhard with Dag Solstad's Professor Andersen's Night, translated by Agnes Scott Langeland.
The narrator of the novel - the 35 year old Sebastián Castillo (the á vs a a modification to his birthname) shares some similarities with the author - such as a book called 57 Colombian Novels vs the authors 49 Venezuelan Novels, as well as some questionable tweets - but this is purely fictional. The 57 Colombian/49 Venezuelan books are a series of micro-novels, and this part of the narrator's worldview was one that was personally very resonant (little else was) in terms of literature (some may say less in my speaking style):
I began writing short snippets of fabulist narrative that I called "novels." They were but a paragraph long each, but to me, they were as good as novels, or as good as any novel one could imagine. And one could read them much more quickly! The truth is I have never gone on at great length. In the writing of these short prose texts—these novels—I sought to make this sort of attitude definitive and physical. For when someone goes on at great length, they in fact have very little to say. However long one goes on, it is inversely proportionate to what one has to say. If one is wont to bloviate, to meander, to linger, to assay for very long, it is because one in fact has almost nothing to say; one is filling in the empty locus of their brain with idle chatter,
The first part of the novel is an unbroken interior monologue by the narrator, contemplating how he will spend New Year's Eve later that day. He has been invited to a small reunion of students from his year hosted by his philosophy professor, Professor Aleister, from the small liberal arts college they attended over a decade ago - the main enticement being the presence of a fellow ex-student Maria on whom the narrator had a massive but unrequieted crush, and who he has since followed on social media, noticing to his delight recently that she had separated from her husband.
During his monologue we learn that he has taken Pascal's famous maxim 'Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre' rather too much to heart, quitting his role as a philosophy and literature lecture:
For a full year, I had left my apartment only to go to the gym. Otherwise, I had all my necessities delivered to me. I had seen no one, and I had spoken to no one: I had not said a word out loud in three hundred and sixty-four days, not even to myself. The last person with whom I had shared words was the English department secretary, the previous December, who, as I was checking my faculty mailbox before parting, asked me what I planned to do with my winter break, after my accident. I said that I planned to sit quietly alone in my room and ask myself, Must you go out? What pressing matter is there outside you must attend to? Must you speak?
As part of his thoughts he imagines his conversation with Maria, for example the surprise she will express at his gym-honed physique (he has gone on a social-media-video fuelled health bent after suffering an amphetamine-induced heart-scare).
In the second part he does visit the professor - but (to no surprise to the reader) he is the only guest, or at least the only one that attends - and is subject to a Bernhardian monologue from the Professor Aleister where his role as interlocutor is to be simply a silent, passive listener.
And returning to the city, in a coda, he comes across a younger man on the subway reading a Jordan-Peterson-like book which he snatches from the reader's hands and destroys, foisting on him instead a valuable first edition of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet which he had liberated from the Professor's house.
I wasn't sure this was entirely successful (at least vs my, perhaps overly heightened, expectations) - the dual characters of the Professor and the narrator slightly diluted the intensity of the novel - and the description of the novel by one of the author's friends as a male My Year of Rest and Relaxation for me is a back-handed compliment. This Washinghton Post review is close to my view.
But still a well-written and compact read, with more depth than may appear, as per this review which engaged with the novel more deeply than I did.
3.5 stars rounded to 3.
i have to come clean: i have never read a single word written by thomas bernhard. i just sort of imagined what his books were like and went from there. sorry for the pain this might cause
following up when the replies missed the irony:
to clarify: i've read 9 books by bernhard. but then i entered a machine that makes you forget the novels written by thomas bernhard, which happened just before i wrote my book. a guy on the street made me do it, he invented this machine. so basically i haven't read him. sorry
Only 9? Slacker!
But this novel combines influences including Bernhard with Dag Solstad's Professor Andersen's Night, translated by Agnes Scott Langeland.
The narrator of the novel - the 35 year old Sebastián Castillo (the á vs a a modification to his birthname) shares some similarities with the author - such as a book called 57 Colombian Novels vs the authors 49 Venezuelan Novels, as well as some questionable tweets - but this is purely fictional. The 57 Colombian/49 Venezuelan books are a series of micro-novels, and this part of the narrator's worldview was one that was personally very resonant (little else was) in terms of literature (some may say less in my speaking style):
I began writing short snippets of fabulist narrative that I called "novels." They were but a paragraph long each, but to me, they were as good as novels, or as good as any novel one could imagine. And one could read them much more quickly! The truth is I have never gone on at great length. In the writing of these short prose texts—these novels—I sought to make this sort of attitude definitive and physical. For when someone goes on at great length, they in fact have very little to say. However long one goes on, it is inversely proportionate to what one has to say. If one is wont to bloviate, to meander, to linger, to assay for very long, it is because one in fact has almost nothing to say; one is filling in the empty locus of their brain with idle chatter,
The first part of the novel is an unbroken interior monologue by the narrator, contemplating how he will spend New Year's Eve later that day. He has been invited to a small reunion of students from his year hosted by his philosophy professor, Professor Aleister, from the small liberal arts college they attended over a decade ago - the main enticement being the presence of a fellow ex-student Maria on whom the narrator had a massive but unrequieted crush, and who he has since followed on social media, noticing to his delight recently that she had separated from her husband.
During his monologue we learn that he has taken Pascal's famous maxim 'Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre' rather too much to heart, quitting his role as a philosophy and literature lecture:
For a full year, I had left my apartment only to go to the gym. Otherwise, I had all my necessities delivered to me. I had seen no one, and I had spoken to no one: I had not said a word out loud in three hundred and sixty-four days, not even to myself. The last person with whom I had shared words was the English department secretary, the previous December, who, as I was checking my faculty mailbox before parting, asked me what I planned to do with my winter break, after my accident. I said that I planned to sit quietly alone in my room and ask myself, Must you go out? What pressing matter is there outside you must attend to? Must you speak?
As part of his thoughts he imagines his conversation with Maria, for example the surprise she will express at his gym-honed physique (he has gone on a social-media-video fuelled health bent after suffering an amphetamine-induced heart-scare).
In the second part he does visit the professor - but (to no surprise to the reader) he is the only guest, or at least the only one that attends - and is subject to a Bernhardian monologue from the Professor Aleister where his role as interlocutor is to be simply a silent, passive listener.
And returning to the city, in a coda, he comes across a younger man on the subway reading a Jordan-Peterson-like book which he snatches from the reader's hands and destroys, foisting on him instead a valuable first edition of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet which he had liberated from the Professor's house.
I wasn't sure this was entirely successful (at least vs my, perhaps overly heightened, expectations) - the dual characters of the Professor and the narrator slightly diluted the intensity of the novel - and the description of the novel by one of the author's friends as a male My Year of Rest and Relaxation for me is a back-handed compliment. This Washinghton Post review is close to my view.
But still a well-written and compact read, with more depth than may appear, as per this review which engaged with the novel more deeply than I did.
3.5 stars rounded to 3.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 21, 2025
when he said "I looked like the picture of John Lennon walking strangely” I loled.
July 25, 2025
I've recently picked up a couple works of contemporary fiction because they advertised premises intended to resonate with someone just like myself:
- A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, on a platonic opposite-sex friendship.
- Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, on a critique of millennial lifestyle consumerism.
Disappointingly, these novels played out like tedious, repetitious variations on their core theme. The writing was pointed, but there was no vigor.
Flipping through Fresh, Green Life at the bookstore, I spotted references to Dante, Heidegger, Deleuze, and expected more of the same, but purchased it nonetheless. Maybe it's that it's written in my native language, set in a city just north of me; maybe it's what some on Twitter have called the fittingness of the Bernhardian voice to a wide, over-educated audience of lit-fic bluestockings, but I was pleasantly surprised by the verve of Sebastian Castillo's prose. I was worried it would lean too heavily on auto-fictional tropes, but the narrator's tone and diction is more that of a weary romantic than irony-poisoned heteroclite (he intentionally avoids using proper nouns to mark brands, celebrities, etc. with signifiers). Castillo accomplishes a rare act, bringing Dostoevskian seriousness to the malaise of the aughts/tens/twenties, sedulously balancing our congenital sarcasm with aspirational sincerity.
- A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, on a platonic opposite-sex friendship.
- Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, on a critique of millennial lifestyle consumerism.
Disappointingly, these novels played out like tedious, repetitious variations on their core theme. The writing was pointed, but there was no vigor.
Flipping through Fresh, Green Life at the bookstore, I spotted references to Dante, Heidegger, Deleuze, and expected more of the same, but purchased it nonetheless. Maybe it's that it's written in my native language, set in a city just north of me; maybe it's what some on Twitter have called the fittingness of the Bernhardian voice to a wide, over-educated audience of lit-fic bluestockings, but I was pleasantly surprised by the verve of Sebastian Castillo's prose. I was worried it would lean too heavily on auto-fictional tropes, but the narrator's tone and diction is more that of a weary romantic than irony-poisoned heteroclite (he intentionally avoids using proper nouns to mark brands, celebrities, etc. with signifiers). Castillo accomplishes a rare act, bringing Dostoevskian seriousness to the malaise of the aughts/tens/twenties, sedulously balancing our congenital sarcasm with aspirational sincerity.
July 19, 2025
4.5! Elegant prose with some big words (eg. tatterdemalion, braggadocious), which is my only complaint about the book; otherwise it’s exactly what I love reading – a straightforward plot with infinitely expansive windings through the mind of an cheerless, bitter and self-pitying protagonist. But of course, delivered with jabs of humour. Imagine Bernhard and Pessoa, but contemporary and relatable in the landscape of 2025.
Read
June 17, 2025mycket rolig! mer utvecklad recension kommer snart i KULT MAGASIN…
July 4, 2025
Quite funny! always nice to indulge in something that is simply so entertaining and also contemporary. for such a short book it covers a lot of topical ground: right wing masculinity grifters, self-help culture, that pic of John Lennon walking strangely, etc. The novel also offers a fairly sophisticated rumination on Lacan's formulation of fantasy / desire through the narrator's enchantment with a former classmate. As a refresher, the formula is represented as such: $<>a, wherein "$" is the "barred subject", an ultimately incomplete, incohesive subject split as such by a linguistic relation to the symbolic order. Who is a better example of a barred subject than an overeducated and underemployed man who gets into working out because of wellness gurus on youtube and never got over a crush from university? The novel is truly at its smartest when it thinks it is being dumb, which I mean as a serious compliment.
October 2, 2025
I went into this book somewhat skeptical, as it borrows the latest trendy Thomas Bernhard rhetorical motif that Jordan Castro implements in his own recent book by this same exact publisher ('The Novelist', 'Soft Skull Press', [Penguin Random House (?)]). These are two books that both use a 1st person narration with a 'Thomas Bernhard' 'moment-by-moment' play-by-play narrator tense to deconstruct modern ideas like social media, etc. I feel 'burnt out', etc, by craven postmodernist attempts at 'the novel' which seem to defensively disarm their anxieties about creating literature even as they burn them into the page. 'I'm writing a book about writing -- ha ha! Isn't that clever? Anyhow, here's my Penguin Random House top Five Publisher Book Deal Novel.' Assholes. What enamors me, then, to 'Fresh, Green Life: A Novel (Paperback)' is it actually does become 'literature'. It doesn't remain a bog standard internet-savvy deconstruction. It is, in itself, a fable. This will be revealed to you as you read it. This is a heroic journey mossy with pathos and the grief of youth lost all set in the nation-state of Philadelphia. I saw some article about 'reviving masculinity in literature' (not a direct quote) that included this book and it pissed me off because this was never a novel about 'working class construction white men' or whatever. This is a novel about the unique sadness of academia that is nostalgic without being corny, sad while being funny. A good book, in my opinion, one that I found worth reading and would recommend.
July 3, 2025
this book is a delight; scrumptious, quick, and painfully relatable. as a person married to an academic and from a long line of deranged academics with houses full of book piles, dried oil paint tubes, newspapers, Castillo does a wonderful job of immersing you in the world of those who submerge themselves in literature, translation, and philosophy because it takes one to know one.
July 5, 2025
Really quick and captivating and much less annoying than the premise seems.
January 1, 2026
A surprising, last minute entry for 2025! I read this leading up to New Year's Eve since that's when this novel takes place because I'm annoying.
I enjoyed this. Very philosophical, reflective, and sardonic all at the same time. It feels like an appropriate read for the end of the first half of my 30th year and the end of the year in general. I feel myself wanting to reread this perhaps as a tradition.
I enjoyed this. Very philosophical, reflective, and sardonic all at the same time. It feels like an appropriate read for the end of the first half of my 30th year and the end of the year in general. I feel myself wanting to reread this perhaps as a tradition.
September 26, 2025
Amusing!
October 12, 2025
This book made me laugh out loud many times. And good move by the publisher to include a giant photo of the author on the back because I'm in love now
January 28, 2026
Rounding up because it was so nice of Skye to send me a copy
January 1, 2026
only someone really pretentious could satirize pretentious people like this
August 30, 2025
Our narrator Sebastian Castillo (who is not the author Sebastian Castillo) is a professor and is thinking about his university cohort of friends--4 students working with a certain professor. He has a bit of a crush on the woman of their group, but was quiet about it. He has been somewhat of a cyberstalker, following her Insta and deciding she is divorced now. Then the professor invites the four to one last party, on New Year's Eve.
And then this story slowly unwinds. Or goes off the rails. I read this with LARB and it was VERY unexpected. An excellent unreliable narrator.
And then this story slowly unwinds. Or goes off the rails. I read this with LARB and it was VERY unexpected. An excellent unreliable narrator.
January 13, 2026
3.5
this is what happens to you when you think you’re above reading poetry and smiling and being happy
this is what happens to you when you think you’re above reading poetry and smiling and being happy
January 1, 2026
im kind of obsessed with this and thought it was fun. men really just yap and read philosophy instead of going to therapy. this is thee performative male story
January 6, 2026
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that made me want to meet/ date the author so badly
January 18, 2026
It’s really rare that satire genuinely moves me past sadness towards tenderness! This was so surprising & successfully funny
September 10, 2025
The momentum and flow of Castillo’s prose was really enthralling. I’ve grown to enjoy literary novels a lot this year and this was such a lovely, amusing and wry novel. Very excited for Salmon to come in next for another read by Castillo.
August 30, 2025
This was so philosophy student coded
August 16, 2025
Probably says only insulting things about me that reading this book was some of the most fun I’ve had reading in a couple years.
January 2, 2025
I enjoyed this; a quick New Years read. A touch of the Bernhard but with a lighter, friendly tone. Holds your attention narratively, simple but never exactly predictable. Love the specificity of it, the location and feeling. Looking forward to what Sebastián does next.
Read
June 26, 2025It seems like this will be annoying but it's actually awesome
July 21, 2025
the first half was such a bop and the second half was such a slog… but I think the difference lay in me rather than the book itself.
August 19, 2025
This was so hilarious to me. The closest comparisons I can come up with are Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner and Cool for America by Andrew Martin.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 128 reviews