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The Endless Week
From the 2023 winner of the Prix Goncourt for poetry comes a debut novel unlike any other, a lyrical anti-epic about the beauty, violence, trauma, and absurdity of the internet age.
Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim’s online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. It is a major work by one of the most fearlessly original writers of our time.
Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim’s online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. It is a major work by one of the most fearlessly original writers of our time.
296 pages, Paperback
Published September 30, 2025
20 people are currently reading
637 people want to read
About the author
Laura Vázquez
29 books27 followersLaura Vanesa Vazquez Hutnik es investigadora, crítica y docente. Doctora en Ciencias Sociales por la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) e investigadora del CONICET. Es Profesora de “Historia de los Medios de Comunicación Nacional y Latinoamericana”, en la Universidad Nacional de Moreno. En la Carrera de Ciencias de la Comunicación de la UBA coordina el Área de Narrativas Dibujadas. Realizó su Postdoctorado en la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales (UBA). Se desempeña como docente en la Maestría de Crítica y Difusión de las Artes, en el UNA. Ha sido invitada como expositora en congresos nacionales e internacionales. Publicó los libros: El oficio de las viñetas. La industria de la historieta argentina (Paidós, 2010) y Fuera de Cuadro. Ideas sobre historieta argentina (Agua Negra, 2012). Dirigió el Congreso Internacional y Bienal de la Historieta y el Humor Gráfico “Viñetas Serias” (2010; 2012 y 2014). Como guionista de historietas publicó en Argentina y en España los libros Entreactos e Historias Corrientes, con dibujos de Dante Ginevra y Federico Rubenacker, respectivamente. Escribió una sección mensual en la revista Fierro entre 2010 y 2014. En 2014, dirigió junto a Oscar Steimberg la revista académica Entre Líneas (revista de estudios sobre historieta y humor gráfico). Intenta escribir ficción cuando la academia le da respiros.
(fuente: Tebeosfera)
(fuente: Tebeosfera)
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 1, 2025
I want to say that this is the craziest book of the year, but to say that I would first have to read every single other thing that was published this year, from Big 5 releases to self-published romantasy smut to religious pamphlets, and even then, before making my official confirmation, I would also have to stop and analyze whether I even have the authority to speak for the crazy community in deeming anything to be the craziest anything of anything, and then I get a headache and decide to just say, well, this book is pretty damn crazy but only possibly, really close but still only possibly, the craziest thing that will come out this year. Possibly.
December 23, 2025
*The Endless Week* reads like a schizophrenic novel in which money, language, and affect all stutter in place, refusing to cohere. The big and the small make no difference; the existential and the mundane, beauty and horror, swim in the same terrible fishbowl, each new scene another almost compulsive offshoot. It feels like being slowly dissolved.
On the surface, this is “about” the impending death of an already vegetable grandmother: a body technically still in the family even as everyone around her occupies their own states of non‑being. Plot is almost beside the point. What matters is the accumulation of not‑quite‑living—depression, addiction, economic precarity, exploitation, and absurdist violence.
There is no clear arc so much as lateral connection: images and sentences recur with slight mutations, motifs burrow sideways rather than upwards. The result is a text that metastasizes in all directions at once—across bodies, rooms, screens—without offering the relief of progression. The language is deceptively plain and deadpan, but it moves by repetition and tiny shifts, like someone hammering the same nail a little deeper each time, generating not eventful horror but a grinding, low‑level dread that never resolves.
The characters live in a world where time is fragmented and continuous at once, where work, caregiving, and online life blur into an undifferentiated present, and where desire is both intensified and hollowed out. The violence—familial, economic, bodily, psychic—is less spectacular than pervasive: care as entrapment, the internet as an infinite “elsewhere” that never actually lets anyone leave the room. The book keeps jumping registers—funny to grotesque to tender to sickening—without changing key, as if all affect existed on the same flattened, hyperlinked plane.
What makes *The Endless Week* so profoundly interesting, and so exhausting, is that it refuses to separate the serious from the trivial. The slow dying of the grandmother and the petty cruelties of a given day, the looming sense of planetary and economic collapse and the boredom of scrolling—all of it sits in the same bowl, bumping against the same glass. The novel is saturated with violence, but mostly violence of attrition rather than climax, a suffocating accumulation of harms, frustrations, and degradations that feels uncomfortably close to contemporary life.
And yet, it is brilliant. Its rigor—its commitment to staying inside this fishbowl without flinching—produces a rare clarity about what it means to live under these conditions. It is funny in a way that hurts, tender without ever sentimentalizing, horrifying while remaining intimately domestic. Five stars, absolutely: one of the clearest fictional articulations of the kind of life late capital makes possible, a life technically ongoing but experienced as not quite being.
On the surface, this is “about” the impending death of an already vegetable grandmother: a body technically still in the family even as everyone around her occupies their own states of non‑being. Plot is almost beside the point. What matters is the accumulation of not‑quite‑living—depression, addiction, economic precarity, exploitation, and absurdist violence.
There is no clear arc so much as lateral connection: images and sentences recur with slight mutations, motifs burrow sideways rather than upwards. The result is a text that metastasizes in all directions at once—across bodies, rooms, screens—without offering the relief of progression. The language is deceptively plain and deadpan, but it moves by repetition and tiny shifts, like someone hammering the same nail a little deeper each time, generating not eventful horror but a grinding, low‑level dread that never resolves.
The characters live in a world where time is fragmented and continuous at once, where work, caregiving, and online life blur into an undifferentiated present, and where desire is both intensified and hollowed out. The violence—familial, economic, bodily, psychic—is less spectacular than pervasive: care as entrapment, the internet as an infinite “elsewhere” that never actually lets anyone leave the room. The book keeps jumping registers—funny to grotesque to tender to sickening—without changing key, as if all affect existed on the same flattened, hyperlinked plane.
What makes *The Endless Week* so profoundly interesting, and so exhausting, is that it refuses to separate the serious from the trivial. The slow dying of the grandmother and the petty cruelties of a given day, the looming sense of planetary and economic collapse and the boredom of scrolling—all of it sits in the same bowl, bumping against the same glass. The novel is saturated with violence, but mostly violence of attrition rather than climax, a suffocating accumulation of harms, frustrations, and degradations that feels uncomfortably close to contemporary life.
And yet, it is brilliant. Its rigor—its commitment to staying inside this fishbowl without flinching—produces a rare clarity about what it means to live under these conditions. It is funny in a way that hurts, tender without ever sentimentalizing, horrifying while remaining intimately domestic. Five stars, absolutely: one of the clearest fictional articulations of the kind of life late capital makes possible, a life technically ongoing but experienced as not quite being.
November 11, 2025
A haunting and beautiful exploration of apathy and psychosis, written in prose that was clearly composed in the mind of a poet. This book drags a black highlighter across society's dehumanization and commercialization of the individual. Great book, Ms. Vázquez.
June 14, 2025
This knocked my socks right off. Full review to come.
December 8, 2025
The endless read :D
The majority of this was just too formless to follow. There was something magnetic about the writing, and a few bits did make me laugh out loud on the train, but I had to process it all LINE BY LINE because I never fully grasped who the characters were or what they were on about. This got exhausting after 150 pages and I was fully ready to move on with my life after 200. I trudged to the end because I had hope and new books are expensive but damn.
Should’ve abandoned at the first unnecessary torture passage. It only got worse from there…
The majority of this was just too formless to follow. There was something magnetic about the writing, and a few bits did make me laugh out loud on the train, but I had to process it all LINE BY LINE because I never fully grasped who the characters were or what they were on about. This got exhausting after 150 pages and I was fully ready to move on with my life after 200. I trudged to the end because I had hope and new books are expensive but damn.
Should’ve abandoned at the first unnecessary torture passage. It only got worse from there…
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January 8, 2026The Endless Book :(
December 4, 2025
Like Lanthimos characters straightfaced through the absurdist ends of worst case scenarios bur even more whimsical and not really funny
December 12, 2025
This a pretty good, but not entirely consistent, read. I picked up The Endless Week after reading an excerpt in a magazine, which I enjoyed. Vasquez’s depictions of television, media, celebrity, are where she is strongest. They achieve a satirical edge by toeing the line between believable and ridiculous; she effectively distills their factory-made sincerity into one key adjective used in the television’s copy around which you can reflexively map the rest of the speech in your head. Almost like a “name that tune” but for corporate-approved inspiration.
It’s interesting, because, overall, it feels like the most interesting parts of the book are most on the periphery of its narrative. The scenes depicting television are the strongest. The strangers, neighbors, social workers, and roommates are the most outspoken, do the most, think the most, and are consequently pretty interesting. Salim’s father, sister, and his friend Jonathan have odd obsessions that they discuss now and then, but mostly they bear witness to the activities of the strangers, neighbors, roommates, etc., so they’re once-in-a-while, but not regularly, interesting.
And then there’s Salim, who seems to have no feelings or desires outside of generating poetry and sometimes remembering he has to find his mother, and, as the person we spend the most time with, is least interesting. If I had to guess, he’s supposed to represent some sort of sense of alienation/isolation through technology, but we get no hint of this alienation creating any inner turmoil for him. When he goes outside and meets people, he acts exactly the same as he does when alone, so why does he need to stay indoors? He feels more cabinet than human, and if that’s the commentary we are supposed to get about technology’s effect on the youth, that it drains them of all emotions, submerges them in an insurmountable vat of numbness, I think that’s off-the-mark and potentially implies a dispassionate attitude toward humanity.
Another thing that stuck in my craw was a repeated style of paragraph that kept being used throughout, where an “unusual” thesis would be introduced with confidence, and then explored pretty thoroughly, and then cast aside. They’d read like:
“All things have hands. You can find them anywhere. Eye sockets are hands. Nostrils are hands for mucus. Canyons are hands for the sky. Blades of grass have hands they use to capture beads of dew. Gravity itself is one giant hand, holding all of us carefully like a newborn baby, keeping us from falling and hitting our head on a counter.”
And I guess I wouldn’t have minded them so much if they were more interesting, but they were mostly as interesting as the above example, which I just made up. I have a test I use when I read a book where I imagine someone saying portions of the book out loud to me as if we were in a casual conversation, and if I find myself imagining myself being annoyed by what is being said and telling whoever is talking in these scenarios to shut up, I feel confident that it is not good writing. These portions of the book didn’t provide anything other than a more legitimate word count, thereby making it look and feel like a more legitimate novel.
Also one of the blurbs described this book as “hilarious.” Nothing in this book was hilarious. Some of it was pretty funny and smart. If the literary world thinks this book satisfies the criteria for being “hilarious,” said world needs to get outside more.
It’s interesting, because, overall, it feels like the most interesting parts of the book are most on the periphery of its narrative. The scenes depicting television are the strongest. The strangers, neighbors, social workers, and roommates are the most outspoken, do the most, think the most, and are consequently pretty interesting. Salim’s father, sister, and his friend Jonathan have odd obsessions that they discuss now and then, but mostly they bear witness to the activities of the strangers, neighbors, roommates, etc., so they’re once-in-a-while, but not regularly, interesting.
And then there’s Salim, who seems to have no feelings or desires outside of generating poetry and sometimes remembering he has to find his mother, and, as the person we spend the most time with, is least interesting. If I had to guess, he’s supposed to represent some sort of sense of alienation/isolation through technology, but we get no hint of this alienation creating any inner turmoil for him. When he goes outside and meets people, he acts exactly the same as he does when alone, so why does he need to stay indoors? He feels more cabinet than human, and if that’s the commentary we are supposed to get about technology’s effect on the youth, that it drains them of all emotions, submerges them in an insurmountable vat of numbness, I think that’s off-the-mark and potentially implies a dispassionate attitude toward humanity.
Another thing that stuck in my craw was a repeated style of paragraph that kept being used throughout, where an “unusual” thesis would be introduced with confidence, and then explored pretty thoroughly, and then cast aside. They’d read like:
“All things have hands. You can find them anywhere. Eye sockets are hands. Nostrils are hands for mucus. Canyons are hands for the sky. Blades of grass have hands they use to capture beads of dew. Gravity itself is one giant hand, holding all of us carefully like a newborn baby, keeping us from falling and hitting our head on a counter.”
And I guess I wouldn’t have minded them so much if they were more interesting, but they were mostly as interesting as the above example, which I just made up. I have a test I use when I read a book where I imagine someone saying portions of the book out loud to me as if we were in a casual conversation, and if I find myself imagining myself being annoyed by what is being said and telling whoever is talking in these scenarios to shut up, I feel confident that it is not good writing. These portions of the book didn’t provide anything other than a more legitimate word count, thereby making it look and feel like a more legitimate novel.
Also one of the blurbs described this book as “hilarious.” Nothing in this book was hilarious. Some of it was pretty funny and smart. If the literary world thinks this book satisfies the criteria for being “hilarious,” said world needs to get outside more.
May 24, 2025
One of Dorothy Projects 2025 titles. The Endless Week is a hyper contemporary look at family life - following two siblings who engage with the world primarily through their online presence, their father who has many pieces of wisdom that he is trying to impart on his children, and their sick grandmother. Vazquez explores not only family life but also violence and cruelty as can be exasperated by online life. It was hard for me to get into and a little twisted for my personal sensibilities. Look out for The Endless Week which publishes on September 30th.
August 10, 2025
the creativity in this book goes crazy... and i mean that both literally and figuratively.
reading this meant forcing myself to exist in a world with characters who have uncontrolled minds that run rampant with absurd, drawn-out thoughts. definitely didn't enjoy that so much, but i also couldn't help but appreciate the inventiveness of an author who is capable of generating what seemed like an endless succession of nonsensical ideas. (i added a star because of that.)
reading this meant forcing myself to exist in a world with characters who have uncontrolled minds that run rampant with absurd, drawn-out thoughts. definitely didn't enjoy that so much, but i also couldn't help but appreciate the inventiveness of an author who is capable of generating what seemed like an endless succession of nonsensical ideas. (i added a star because of that.)
January 8, 2026
"Do you think God has a favorite language?"
Page after page, profound philosophical examinations on death, humanity, beauty, existence, purpose, morality come in the form of young social media posters. A story woven in a surrealist dreamscape (nightmarescape) brings its own questions about reality.
I want to start a group for readers of this book -- not so much a book club; more like a therapy group. My mind won't recover from this book anytime soon.
Page after page, profound philosophical examinations on death, humanity, beauty, existence, purpose, morality come in the form of young social media posters. A story woven in a surrealist dreamscape (nightmarescape) brings its own questions about reality.
I want to start a group for readers of this book -- not so much a book club; more like a therapy group. My mind won't recover from this book anytime soon.
December 21, 2025
Definitely the weirdest read of the year for me and in all the best ways. It felt like an absurdist fever dream that also made me laugh. A social critique of our digital world and the numbing apathy that comes with it.
Some of the vignettes were so vivid, strange, and even grotesque that you simply couldn’t put them down.
Some of the vignettes were so vivid, strange, and even grotesque that you simply couldn’t put them down.
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January 4, 2026“I work on my phone. Right now, I’m reading Google’s confidentiality guidelines backwards. I take a break every three hours to watch videos of obese people being humiliated by a muscular trainer.” I’ve genuinely never read anything like this book.
October 12, 2025
génialitop jtm lisez toustes
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December 12, 2025Dorothy is my friend;
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews