Savaş Üçlemesi

by Agustín Fernández Mallo, Ayşe Nihal Akbulut (Translator)

Savaş her zaman cephede başlamaz. Bazen bir anının içinde, bir haritanın kenarında ya da bir sözcüğün sessizliğinde patlak verir.

Agustín Fernández Mallo, bu ödüllü romanında, bizi üç kıta arasında salınan, zamanın yıpratıcılığına direnmeye çalışan anlatıcıların hikayeleriyle buluşturur: Franco rejiminin toplama kampı olan San Simón Adası'nda geçmişle yüzleşen bir edebiyatçı, ABD'de yaşamına zaman zaman uzaktan bakan "eski bir astronot" ve Normandiya'nın soğuk kıyılarında dolaşan bir yazar. Üç ayrı coğrafyada ilerleyen bu anlatılar, yalnızca geçmişin hayaletlerini değil, modern çağın bireysel ve kolektif travmalarını da ele verir. Mallo'nun şiir, bilim, antropoloji, popüler kültür ve tarih arasında kurduğu benzersiz ağ, okuru alıştığı anlatı biçimlerinin ötesine taşır ve tarih, bellek, kimlik üzerine sarsıcı bir yolculuğa çıkarır. Böylece savaşın fiziksel cephesinden çok, duygusal ve zihinsel yankılarını ön plana çıkarır.

Savaş Üçlemesi: Görünmeyen izlerin romanı - zamanla, mekânla ve dille yapılan zarif ve derin bir hesaplaşma

Genres: Fiction, Spain, Spanish Literature, Literature, Historical Fiction, Audiobook, 21st Century

480 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2018

About the author

Agustín Fernández Mallo (A Coruña, 1967) es un físico y escritor español afincado en Palma de Mallorca. Es uno de los miembros más destacados de la llamada Generación Nocilla, Generación Mutante o Afterpop, cuya denominación más popular procede del título de una serie de sus novelas.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his latest work, Mallo creates a permeable world where reality, fiction, the living, and the dead intersect. The novel is a triptych of three shorter works, each of which has a distinct voice, but all three of which depict the aftershocks of war. In an indirect way, this can be read as an exploration of the legacy of Francoism, an era that is now an echo - present but not present like a war that has concluded. Mallo explores new forms and pushes narrative boundaries in a way that is both exciting and provocative. This is a work that deserves a wider audience.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

All human beings, no matter how far apart and unknown to one another they may be, are in fact joined by one war or another, the six degrees of separation that sociologist proved all those years ago, it would actually be cut to just four degrees if we took into account the wars that unite us all. And this doesn't only go for the present, but joins us to all the dead as well, as far back as cave people. Like the stars, shining down on us even though they're long dead, we're a legion of the living and the dead, joined by the self-same thing: destruction and war.

Translated by Thomas Bunstead from the original by Agustín Fernández Mallo and published by perhaps the UK’s finest publisher of translated fiction Fitzcarraldo Editions.

As so often in the novel the speaker here is not the first person narrator, but rather an interlocutor, here a friend from New York in the early 1980s and son of Armenian parents who emigrated in 1915 to escape the genocide. But the quote speaks to a key theme of this brilliant novel as the author explained in an interview in the Paris Review (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2... - again translated by Bunstead):

There is a recurring idea in the novel, the thesis that the dead are never entirely dead, that in fact we cohabit a kind of hybrid space, us and them, as well as that the largest social network ever is not that of the internet but the one that joins the living with the dead. This leads us additionally to the idea that we are all socially connected with somebody who died in war.

The two titles of the novel, in original and translation, also play to this theme.

In Spanish, the novel was entitled, Trilogía de la Guerra, reflecting the three parts - each novels in their own right - that comprise the text:

In effect, [the book] is composed of a trio of novels shot through with the experiences of people who have either been through war, or are still living out wars they’ve been through. But they aren’t accounts of those wars, or indeed of the characters’ fortunes during them, but deal rather with what we might call the B side of war, its unsuspected echoes in our day-to-day lives

The English title, comes from one of the book’s two epigraphs (the other being “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”), by the poet Carlos Oroza “Es un error dar por hecho lo que fue contemplado”, translated by Bunstead as “It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given,” a phrase that reoccurs in the novel, including as anonymous text messages received by the narrator of the first sub-novel even when he is without a mobile signal, the significance of which we learn at the end of the third. The author comments in the interview that the quote “in the context of this novel can be interpreted as “it’s a mistake to take as dead that which we have seen die.”

Fernández Mallo also added that the four keys to the novel, in addition to a real-life trip to the Galician island of San Simón (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_...) which is echoed by one taken by the narrator of the first-novel, are David Lynch, W. G. Sebald, Elias Canetti, and Salvador Dalí.

I must admit the Canetti connection passed me by as while I have read Auto-da-fe I can’t claim to have much familiarity with his work. But Lynch’s influence is clear (thanks to my GR friend Neil) in the recurrence of odd imagery throughout the novel (from biscuits baked in the shape of a pregnant dog and made with human breast milk, to the hands chopped off the statue of a saint in 21st century Spain that wash up on the shores of Normandy decades earlier). And Dalí appears, post his real-life death, as an eccentric in modern-day New York.

The Sebaldian influence was most striking to me.

The first sub-novel is built around photos of San Simón from the late 1930s, when it was a prison camp under the Franco regime, which the narrator attempts to reproduce in his own walks around the island.

In the third sub-novel the female narrator, ex-companion of the narrator of the first, undertakes, a trip along the Normandy coast that is, as she explicitly realises, a mirror of Sebald’s, on the other side of the English channel in East Anglia, in The Rings of Saturn. (There is also an interesting conspiracy theory on the origin of Sebald’s famous photos)

And perhaps most cheekily, there’s a 21st century version of the Sebaldian perambulation, when the narrator of part 1 recounts tracing Nietzsche’s famous, and ultimately fatal, walk in Turin, complete with photos marking his own journey, of people and places seen. Except the photos are rather clearly taken from Google photos, as the author explains:

I believe that this whole search for the exotic and the “other” can and should now give way, in the twenty-first century, to something more effective, more real, and less invasive, traveling as it were secondhand—through social networks, books, television, Google Maps, et cetera—all of this being a kind of “travel” that redefines what is supposedly virtual and makes it real.

For example, in The Things We’ve Seen, using Google Street View, I undertake Nietzsche’s famous walk in Turin, when he hugged the horse and fell permanently mute. Well, I did do that walk physically myself, I went there and did it, I retraced the steps Nietzsche took, but the things that showed up when I consulted the Street View version of the walk seemed far richer to me, far more suggestive for the novel.

This is a novel of at times Sebaldian erudition as well, although Fernández Mallo rightly scorns over-research in fiction:

As for research, it was minimal, the less the better. I’m of the opinion that the need to read up on anything and everything in order to write a novel is a myth that stems from the realist tradition, or from the kind of novel with roots in journalism. Research is a stone that can weigh the writer down, dragging you into the abyss—it prevents you from imagining or being free in your fiction making.

The second part of the novel seemed on first reading incongruous - one narrated by an ex-Vietnam vet, who claims to have been the fourth man on Apollo 11 and third man on the moon, the one who isn’t in any of the footage as he took the pictures. But this proves to be the section that underpins the novel.

Overall, a wonderful novel, and another stand-out from Fitzcarraldo.

[Laura Gotti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un altro dei libroni imperdibili di quest'anno. Di cosa parla? Boh. Chi sono i personaggi? Boh. Dove ci porta? Boh. Devo leggerlo? Certo.
Questo è un libro come Solenoide di Cartarescu ma più piantato per terra, come Sebald. Sono quei libri dove non succede niente, o molto poco, e dove impari tantissimo dalle parole, dalla noia a tratti, dalle nozioni che contengono, dai mondi in cui ci vuole trasportare. Libro diviso in tre parti, interconnesse o no dovete deciderlo voi a seconda di come leggete gli indizi disseminati tra i lunghi capitoli, in cui, a parere mio, la seconda è la meno riuscita, la più letta, la più vista non a caso ambientata negli Stati Uniti in versione decadente, disperata, abbandonata. Ma il primo libro è folgorante e l'ultimo, dove la narratrice è una donna, è quello che brevemente tira un po' le fila del romanzo e che si avvicina di più, citandolo in continuazione, a Gli anelli di Saturno di Sebald ricalcandone quasi la camminata ma sulla sponda opposta: non siamo in Inghilterra ma siamo in Normandia.

Un libro da leggere quando si ha tempo e testa, perché bisogna dargli respiro e, a volte, vincere un po' di noia per trovare poi, nel paragrafo successivo, un po' di folgorazione che ti serviva per tirare il fiato.

Bottigli di Cabernet, generosa e mai scontata, morbida al palato e perfetta per scaldare l'anima in un periodo un po' così.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

148th book of 2023.

4.5. I'm giving this 5-stars because so many books have come close recently, and at this point, I'm holding them back for no real reason. This is a brilliant novel greatly inspired by one of my favourite writers, W.G. Sebald. And where imitators fall down, Mallo leans fully into his Sebald inspirations and even has a character dissecting The Rings of Saturn in the final part.

The book is split into three seemingly (at first) unconnected parts. In the first, a narrator very much like Mallo (as Sebald's narrators are very much like Sebald), visits an island called San Simón. Then he recounts his living in New York, meeting bizarre characters, finding a manuscript, etc. Recurring images crop up. The second book (first person again), is recounted by an American, Kurt Montana, who claims to have been the fourth astronaut on the moon. Things in his story don't add up but it becomes a further reflection on the things from the first book: WW2, 9/11, Brexit, and the strangeness of life. The final part, in full Sebald fashion, follows a woman (from the first book) doing a walking tour of the D-Day beaches in Normandy. At one point she describes being the mirror image of Sebald.

I couldn't put my finger on what the novel is 'about'. This is my fourth Mallo book after his Nocilla Trilogy. In the end, I think it's about a lot of things at once, but what struck me the most is its insistence about the dead (they never leave us), time itself (not as linear as we think), the mirrors and parallels in our lives (taking into account the light having to reach our eyes, our reflection in a mirror is delayed, though imperceptible to the human eye; with the vastness between the ocean, the final narrator is the delayed reflection of Sebald), and how interconnectedness never ends.

_________________

I've now read all of Fitzcarraldo's fiction publications from 2021. With this, the other titles that shouldn't be missed are Cohen's The Netanyahus, the final part of Fosse's Septology (meaning the septology as a whole), and Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I wrote my reviews of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla trilogy a recurring thought was that the books would not be everyone’s cup of tea but that I really liked them. I think the same can be said about this book which, if truth be told, could also be published as a trilogy in three separate volumes (like Nocilla). I tried to imagine how the reading experience would differ if read in three separate books and a significant part of me thinks it might be better that way. That said, the work’s original title is “Trilogía de la guerra” (“War trilogy”) with all three parts contained in a single volume. The English translation, like the Nocilla trilogy, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and translated by Thomas Bunstead (who credits Ana Sánchez Resalt and Margaret Jull Costa “for their help in preparing the text”).

I have to admit that I was favourably biased towards this book by reading the back cover which says it is "Described as the novel David Lynch and W. G. Sebald might have written had they joined forces to explore the B-side of reality". I have very little knowledge of Sebald (“The Rings of Saturn” makes an appearance for several pages in this book and Sebald himself is discussed), but I do have a complete collection of David Lynch DVDs (including all series of Twin Peaks as well as his movies), so I have no hesitation in endorsing that aspect of the description: reading this book feels remarkably like being in a David Lynch movie, for reasons that may become clearer if you keep reading.

The other thing film/TV thing that I thought about several times as I read this is the TV series “Lost” that I spent a lot of time watching over a period of several years when it was first broadcast. This was a weird TV series that was notable for its strange connections that appeared throughout the series. People spent a lot of time searching each episode for these references out to other episodes (an early example was the numbers on a winning lottery ticket matching the numbers painted on the roofs of police cars when seen in an aerial shot of a car park), and reading this book invites the reader into a similar kind of world where strange and apparently bizarre items jump from one part of the trilogy to another and where multiple motifs and phrases repeat in different contexts. Spotting these is a significant part of the fun in reading the book, so I will not mention any of them here.

To begin, an unnamed narrator, a writer, takes part in a conference about ‘Net-Thinking’ held on the island of San Simón off the coast of northwest Spain. When he leaves the conference, he decides not to return home but to sneak back to the now uninhabited island where he begins to delve into the island’s history as a prison camp during the Spanish Civil War. In the kind of thing that will get Lost fans very excited, he uncovers this history on a collection of vintage PCs, all powered by the Intel 486 chip and the hotel room he is staying in is, of course, room 486. That’s a very minor coincidence in the scheme of things, so stay alert! From the island, we move, abruptly and mysteriously, to New York and then to South America and, all the way through, the dreamlike nature of the text builds until we have the perpetual fires of Africa mixing with New York’s falcon population while watching the ongoing churn of rubbish in the East River as a man who seems to be Salvador Dalí tells a story about death by overconsumption of protein, specifically rabbits.

And that’s just Book I.

In Book II, we meet Kurt. Kurt was, he tells us, the fourth astronaut on Apollo 11. Except he has been redacted from the records and doesn’t appear in any photos because he took them. And Book III is narrated by a woman, apparently the abandoned girlfriend of the first narrator, who undertakes a pilgrimage to Normandy where she encounters large numbers of Syrian refugees and the Brexit referendum.

There’s no denying it is a confusing book to read. But I think that’s at least part of the author’s purpose. To return to David Lynch, large parts of the book have the same kind of dreamlike feel that you get watching a Lynch movie. Objects appear and re-appear in what seems a significant ways but might actually just be for atmosphere. What is real in one story appears as part of a hallucination in another. There is repeated reference to multiple layers (e.g. multiple layers of archeology under our feet, multiple layers of carpet in a room and, strangely, multiple layers of epilogues in books - you will understand this when you get to that part of the book). And, for me, it’s this sense of connections across layers that makes the novel hold together despite its apparent randomness. The blurb on the back talks about “the strangeness and interconnectedness of human existence in the twenty-first century” and I think the book really is about this, but it is about it in an allusive sense not in a direct sense, it’s about it in the things it makes you think about as you join the dots yourself rather than in the things it explains directly (which are few and far between), it’s about it in all its digressions and rabbit holes. I made a note as Book I drew to close about how I had smile on my face because I simultaneously had both a sense of things all coming together and a sense of not really knowing what all those things were. That made me smile because I love books that do that to me. You might react very differently, of course. It happened again at the end of Book II and then again in Book III. I don't claim to understand it, but I don't think "understanding it" is what it is about. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy the reading experience.

UPDATE: With thanks to Paul for pointing me towards this, a great interview with the author appeared in The Paris Review a few days after I wrote this review. If this had been available at the time, I would probably have quoted from it more than once: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Once, on a tourist map of Bilbao I came across in a newspaper, I saw that the Guggenheim Museum is the same shape as a gun, a gun captured in the moment it fires a bullet, that is.’

Unsurprisingly an immense (-ly strange/odd) delight to read/savour (to say the least), rounded off to a five. Fuller RTC later, but anyway bits of brilliant excerpts from the obviously brilliant body of text by the wonderful Mallo.

‘For the few minutes they spoke in the cinema entrance, she felt – she told me – she had travelled to a moment in time previous to her own birth. It made her so dizzy she almost fell over on the pavement. Is this not then a projectile, I said to myself, before closing my eyes, a bullet that, fired into the air, comes down again years afterwards? There are such things that, paradoxically, arrive out of the past and impact us for all that we’re yet to arrive in their future.’

‘And it then wasn’t long before I remembered that Mandelbrot, the father of fractals, had first formulated these fantastical mathematical figures when thinking about what it would be like to walk along the coast of Britain, a line of thought he wrote about in his legendary article of 1967, “How Long Is the Coast of Britain?”, published in the journal Science. The thing is, every centimetre of cliff bears within it another cliff that’s infinitely large and identical in scale to its predecessor, and hence every coast is a fractal. This, as I say, is how Mandelbrot came up with fractals in 1967, a term he went on to coin in 1975, pretty shabby things by now given the abuse they’ve suffered at the hands of so many artists, who think they understand fractals but don’t have the first clue, I can’t stand artists who use fractals, I hope you’re the same,’ I nodded, for want of anything else to do, ‘and then, while I was walking this coast, the idea came to me that tumours must also grow in a fractal-like way, it was a real eureka moment, pure thunderbolt from heaven, the kind of idea that comes absolutely out of the blue, I went on taking photographs of the coast, metres at a time, zooming in on centimetres, millimetres, microns at a time, and every single photo looked exactly like the tumours I was so familiar with from studying samples under microscopes in the hospital, and then it came to me that I could try to come up with a mathematical model that would explain tumour growth in fractal terms, a model that has since been proved correct. Pretty amazing, don’t you think? I’ve got the photos from that trip up in the attic, a hundred boxes or more, I had them printed out because I only trust things that decay, you know, paper, flesh, things like that, I can’t put any faith in a bunch of pixels, bit of an oldie in that way, speaking of oldies, have you heard of the writer called W. G. Sebald?’’

‘He put forward In the Mood for Love, the two protagonists of which, like one another’s ghosts, move through a Hong Kong composed of red bedrooms and red hotel hallways, and I left it at that; I was tired of the game now, and it was cold and I wanted to get back in the car; before shutting the door and starting the engine he had crouched down to gather a few of the red-mottled stones, slipping them into his pocket. As I went on walking I thought that he and I had also always been each other’s ghosts. My breath short, I repeated the words ‘We were each other’s ghosts, we were each other’s ghosts,’ and this thought, though I saw it clearly in my head, seemed strange, somewhat incomprehensible even, given that I didn’t know then, and still don’t, what it means to feel certain that you aren’t the partner of the person you’re living with but their ghost, the other’s spectre after they die, and that this is what you’ll be even while they’re still alive. I didn’t want to think about that any more and, pausing for a rest on a flattish rock beside the ditch, took a deep breath, captivated by the smell of Normandy chamomile, which until then I had only come across in soap and air fresheners. I put my rucksack down, got the water bottle out and sipped from it; a red Renault 4 drove by, going quite fast for such an old car; a man with black hair was driving, he waved at me – everybody in this part of the world waves at you, at every opportunity. There are other strange things they do at every opportunity, like closing their eyes and going to sleep whenever there’s a hint of some down time, and not because they’re tired—.’

‘Before going back downstairs he said he would make dinner for me but that, if the tennis match happened to go on, in contravention of what it said on the web page of the hotel chain, he was sorry but he wouldn’t be able to join me. I listened to him going down the stairs.
Seeing some salts by the sink gave me the idea of having a bath. The bath was next to a large window. Body submerged, I looked up at the moon, visible already though it wasn’t completely dark, and, on the horizon, the invisible coast of Great Britain. I wondered if there might be a woman walking that stretch of the English coast as well, and if so, what that double of mine was doing at that moment – if lying in a bath as well, or if still years in the past, going on a trip with him, with her own partner – because isn’t it true that mirrors always entail lapses in time, given the time it takes for light to travel any distance? And isn’t it also true that when you move a hand, it’s a few moments before the hand in the mirror reacts? And is it not equally true that if we’re talking about mirrors the size of a coast, these delays will necessarily build up and you could even have a lapse lasting years? I felt a strong urge to masturbate, but then a multitude of laughable scenes filmed by men of women masturbating in baths came to mind, and the urge went away. From the ground floor there came the noise of things being kicked: Rafa Nadal had just lost another point, I could even have masturbated listening to the sound of those blows, which led the way to Nadal’s sweaty, exquisite body, I decided I might as well wash my hair, which had been impregnated by the disgusting smell of butter.’

‘We gazed at them, I’m not sure exactly how long for, I think the herbal tea was starting to take effect. I focused my sight on the flying fish from Shanghai and was reminded of the one time I’d been to that Chinese city, for a work trip in my twenties, when I was a location scout for television. On that occasion I was working for a producer in Barcelona who was planning to make a series of documentaries about a little-known chapter in our recent history, namely the emigration of Spanish workers to Shanghai in the 1970s, where they’d been contracted to build the dam that to this day waters the city and the great river that bisects it. It turned out to be a far easier job than I’d expected: I quickly found a well-established Spanish community in the city, which left me with plenty of time to wander the streets and read up on the history of Shanghai. I found out about the internment camps created there by the Japanese during the Second World War, when they were still in control of that part of China, and how large numbers of British still in the area from the nineteenth-century colonies were placed in these camps. I had the chance to visit Lunghua internment camp one afternoon, which had been operational between 1943 and 1945 and where the death toll had been particularly high, and which was now a tourist attraction, with recreations of the cells, waxwork prisoners lying in the cots and waxwork children playing football in the yard, where their football, paused between the feet of the tussling children, looked to me like an exact replica of the moon or of some other satellite. I was struck by the innocent name they had given it – Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre – which I think is why I’ve been suspicious of anything containing the words ‘centre’, ‘assembly’ or ‘civilian’ ever since. I took the bus back at nightfall, getting off several stops before my hotel, wanting to stretch my legs, as people say, have a bit of fresh air. Sitting on a bench by the river, I’d seen a cargo ship go past, bound for a European port, I supposed, carrying fake fashion accessories and movies, plates made of imitation porcelain, and other pirated objects, and I wondered what the millions of people working in clandestine workshops, basements and caves would think, those who work for us and whom we nonetheless look down on. People talk about the damage these illegal economies do to our own, but never about the fact the millions of people involved in them also have their own economy, and their own accompanying culture and history therefore; money never exists without generating its own non-transferable form of religion and way of life. They produce counterfeits, yes, but wasn’t the film that I was, in a manner of speaking, participating in, concerning now-departed Spanish immigrants in Shanghai, also a counterfeit? Might not my work have been yet another counterfeit in history, one of all the great many not-entirely factual documentaries that there are? Might not human beings themselves be the result of an incessant counterfeiting, genes upon genes, all of which are nothing but very slightly altered copies? I’d go further: might humankind not possibly be an idea that could disappear at any moment, something that could suddenly cease being human and become something else entirely, either purely animal or post-human? The cargo boat went by, the lights along the side giving it the look of a birthday cake with more candles than any person could ever hope to blow out. I started back towards the hotel. I lost my way several more times but always managed to find the main road again. I came to a KFC that was open 24/7.’

‘I cook a steak for her, one of the staff steaks, not quite the same quality as the food we served guests but, you know, acceptable, and she wolfs it down before asking for a glass of milk, drinking milk with your dinner is for gringos or little children, I say, but that’s what she wants, a glass of milk to wash her steak down, fine, no problem, I go get the milk, and then pull up a stool and sit next to her, behind us the frying pan is sizzling, there’s smoke coming off it, I tell her it’s steam dropping into the oil from the extractor hood though in fact it’s cockroaches clambering up the side of the pan and then having no way to get back out again and getting fried, and when she finishes eating—hammering at the remote until she finds Savage Nature, she then asks me to turn the light off, and we sit in silence watching the birds migrate across the screen, and she says: See, these birds don’t get it either. Don’t get what? I say. They don’t get why they migrate, she says, but they do it all the same, and then she says that what she wants to do is leave, go away, away from her family.’

‘Never had I hated my phone as I did at that moment. I lay down on the sofa, put my feet up and closed my eyes. As I was falling asleep, the thought came to mind: ‘I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook.’’

‘I had spent close to $600 on a walking stick, one of the most expensive and pointless products in the entire store. The whale cannot be killed from inside its belly, I said to myself; evil takes many forms, the most common being when you convince yourself you’ve defeated it. I imagined the hundreds of CCTV watchers, at their screens on their various continents, now sending one other message, having a good old laugh at my expense. It was Sunday: trash collection day in the neighbourhood. When I got to my building, I pulled open one of the trash bags piled up outside the door to the street, and put the walking stick in it. I then took the T-shirt off and put that in as well. Before tying the bag up, the light from the streetlamp allowed me to read the words “The Crime of the Century” one last time, there among food scraps and a quantity of dog food cans. Bare chested, I took the stairs. I entered my apartment, it was warm, I took my pants off. In only my boxers, I reheated some beans left over from my lunch earlier on, when the sun had been at its highest, when, as in a great pause, there had been no shadows in the city. I have been combing this city ever since then, my only desire to find that walking stick and that T-shirt, soul of my trash. They must be somewhere.’ His speech ended there. He sat gazing out at the churning river.’

‘We are the first generation to have grown up under the hegemony of advertising, I said to myself, and it’s no secret that the only thing advertising cannot tolerate is death, which is a thing forever expelled from the paradise of consumerism. That’s why, until now, we Europeans, the millions of us who didn’t live through the Second World War, have had no idea of the posture death assumes when it arrives on our shores. I kicked some pebbles from my path, decided it was a good moment to take my bra off, I had no idea why I’d opted for a sports bra, which I never wear; so tight they seem designed to suffocate.’

‘Gathering the cupcakes, the bread, my drawings and the twenty cigarettes scattered across the bed, and putting it all in a bag, I left the room. In the lobby, I placed my key down on the reception counter. The concierge asked whether I was going to be back for breakfast, I said I didn’t know.’

‘The poppies aren’t growing like they used to, and some have wilted completely. He decides to use what’s left of his life to try to make this yellow poppy bed thrive again.’

‘Since the disappearance, sex is the only thing they feel they can believe in. It’s the only way for them to confirm their faith in one another. Only when having sex do they feel they are formulating the right questions.’

‘The subject of the disappearance of flesh was on my mind during the dinner, most of which I spent not saying anything to anybody, while everyone else, fewer geeks among them now than at lunch, put down their smartphones from time to time and spoke to one another. I looked at the menu: vegetable tart, veal cheeks with potatoes, fruit salad, red wine, coffee – a list that led me to reflect on the special nature of eating, a process through which it was as though the food, dead when you bought it at the supermarket, came back to life in being cooked. A kind of ritual in which, by the act of eating, we made something sacred disappear forever. I went outside to smoke.’

‘Somebody—had gone to the effort of bringing gin, tonic and lemons, and gin and tonics were being prepared in the former cafeteria—To one side, a group was discussing the internet. I said to them that in my view the important thing about the internet was its bodilessness – the fact of it being, in a manner of speaking, one gigantic brain that drifts around the planet without ever encountering the fat, muscles and bones that would tether it to the earth, and that as it drifts it projects all manner of different shadows, which, paradoxically, don’t come about through contact with any kind of body either. Hence the confusion, I continued, concerning everything to do with the net: it’s a primitive organism, still only half-finished, in a phase similar to that of the microorganisms that one day clambered out of the water, millions of years before they became the amphibians that were the precursors of the humans of today—I don’t believe my intervention convinced anyone in this case either. I decided to go for a walk. The breeze carried hints of eucalyptus and the sea.’

‘—in Uruguay he had been a first class baker—he said—before coming out with certain things I found unsettling, such as: ‘Life is a layer of soil no bigger than a dirty napkin,’ and ‘God is a dishwashing machine, the big dishwashing machine,’ then adding that in Argentina he’d worked as a pastry chef, and that ‘intelligence is the final barrier to be demolished,’ and that he sometimes felt afraid, very afraid, and that at that particular moment he was ‘on the very cliffs of fear,’ and even these latter statements, though including no mention of dirty napkins or God or dishwashing machines, unsettled me all the same.’

‘They sometimes flew up and started squawking and flapping around in the air, turning and tumbling at such a rate that they came to form a very dense cloud of feathers. But then, once they calmed down again, they wouldn’t go back to the same niches as before, but settled instead wherever they happened to land—I was witness to this spectacle one day and he told me it was down to the universe contracting as well: ‘The birds aren’t confused, it’s that instinctively they always try to go back to places they’ve been before, such that these homing pigeons could now be called something like “messengers from the past”. Believe me: things go in reverse, things get mixed up. It doesn’t always work like this though, fate sometimes steps in and the reverse direction of travel generates a new and surprising order among things, things that didn’t previously exist.’ Picking up on what he’d said, I suggested that this same quality of fate inverted was responsible for our meeting at that KFC, such an unlikely thing to have happened under normal conditions. It’s true that I enjoyed this kind of talk.’

[Vendedor de rápida · Rating 5 out of 5]

Agustín Fernández Mallo abre su ‘Trilogía de la guerra’ con una visita a la isla coruñesa de San Simón, rememorando las fotografías que allí tomó en la Guerra Civil Dámaso Carrasco Duaso mientras fue preso en el campo de concentración que instaló el bando golpista, y la cierra con un auténtico Apocalipsis bíblico en las playas de Normandía donde las plagas contemporáneas en forma de neofascismo y turismo de masas parecen anunciar un fin del mundo que empieza por el fin de Europa. En el medio, casi 500 páginas de la mejor literatura comunicadas por agujeros negros y gusanos espacio-Tiempo que leeré en 2018. Ojalá disfrutéis tanto como yo.

[Repix Pix · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un maravilloso caleidoscopio de sensaciones, de estar y ser en diferentes momentos, de vivir. Un libro grande y diferente.

[Korcan Derinsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nocilla Üçlemesi’ne hayran olduğum Mallo, Savaş Üçlemesi’nde de kendine has üslubuna kaldığı yerden (hatta birkaç adım ileri götürerek) devam ederek acı, hafıza, savaş, mekan, sanat ve gündelik hayat arasındaki ilişkileri Sebaldvari bir metinle ortaya koyuyor. Fotoğraflar, belgeler, anılar, hikayeler katman katman birbirine ekleniyor, böylece metin hem roman hem edebi hem deneme arası bir türe dönüşüyor. Savaşın izlerini farklı coğrafyalara ve farklı zamanlara yayarak anlatması hem kapsamı hem de üslubu açısından özel bir metnin ortaya çıkmasını sağlıyor. Tek eksiği uzunluğu. Naçizane fikrim bu tarz metinler uzadıkça güçlerinin zayıfladığı yönünde. Sebald bunun dengesini muazzam ayarlayan bir yazar mesela. Mallo’yu sevdiğim için sonuna kadar okudum ama biraz daha kısa olsa etkisinin çok daha fazla olacağına inanıyorum.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

we look for certainty, we die in fear, that's all there is.

as (delightfully) bewildering as the nocilla trilogy was, agustín fernández mallo's new one, the things we've seen (trilogía de la guerra), is even better. the spanish author's latest (originally published in 2018), is more mature, more grounded, and altogether more assured an outing than its predecessor (and entirely different in scope too). a triptych spanning decades, continents, and disparate characters, the things we've seen's three books aren't connected or linked in a linear sense, but repeating themes and phrases reverberate throughout.

it was as though evil was actually held in higher regard than what's good. by this same logic, what's good, with no one keeping an account of it or checking it in any way, is a kind of echo that resounds to the ends of what is known, and its expansion, like that of the universe, will know no limits.

while comparisons to sebald abound (and for good reasons, especially as he and his work figure into part of the things we've seen), fernández mallo's writing in this book reminded me most of javier marías at his digressive best. funny, thought-provoking prose meanders discursively, alighting in places seldom trafficked and often overlooked. with keen observations about modern life, the history that preceded it, and the future still to follow, the things we've seen spurs many a thought about synchronicity and eternal return. fernández mallo is so damn talented a writer and it would indeed be a mistake to take the things we've read as a given.

there are such things that, paradoxically, arrive out of the past and impact us for all that we're yet to arrive in their future.

*translated from the spanish by thomas bunstead (herrera, vila-matas, villoro, halfon, millás, gainza, et al.)

[Marcello S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esagero: il mio libro preferito uscito in Italia nel 2022.

[87/100]

Vedere è il grande tema, vedere è ciò che ci occupa, vedere è ciò che ci ha occupati sempre, vedere dal punto più alto di una ruota panoramica una spiaggia piena di milioni di ossa frantumate di maschi e andarci, desiderare di calpestarne la sabbia e intuire che tra quei granelli giace una moltitudine di anime appartenente a una specie completamente diversa dalla tua. E posso dirlo, posso dirlo perché lo compresi proprio mentre attraversavo la spiaggia di Juno. E mi fermai. Tirai fuori il sacco a pelo, lo dispiegai e, per non profanare ulteriormente quel cimitero, mi ci sedetti sopra; quindi, presi la bottiglia d’acqua e il cono di fish and chips, vistosamente unto. Non capivo come la Gran Bretagna, con un’alimentazione del genere, un tempo fosse riuscita a costruire un impero. La riva del mare era così scura che, se non fosse stato per il rumore delle onde, non sarebbe esistita.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is split into 3 constituent parts (or books) each one with a different narrator. The 1st is a version of the author, the 2nd an American called Kurt Montana who alleges he was the invisible 4th astronaut in the Apollo 11 mission (despite him being too young at the time and also having served at that time as a pilot in Vietnam), the 3rd a woman who has a connection with someone else in the book.

Each character is on a mission of some sort and each ruminates on things seen in a way reminiscent of WG Sebald, and in fact he's directly referenced in the book also.

I found it interesting and enjoyable. Sorry, can't be very specific (as ever). Recommended.

[Pablo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una novela magnífica e importante. Fernández Mallo tiene una voz narrativa que sin ser nunca oscura consigue ser sumamente poética. En esta ocasión, el laberinto de historias que teje va construyendo un sutil todo significativo que culmina con éxito. Como dice en el libro sobre Sebald, “...ésa es la grandeza de toda buena literatura, no sólo hacernos ver lo que no existe sino lo que ni tan siquiera podríamos llegar a concebir”. Si fuera escritor, me hubiera gustado escribir una obra como esta.

[Héctor Genta · Rating 5 out of 5]

«solo dai contorni più esterni, dai bordi estremi, è possibile arrivare a comprendere cosa siano le cose. Si tratta di un principio universale che vale anche per ciascuno di noi, pertanto dobbiamo allontanarci dalla nostra vita se vogliamo vedere che contorno, che sagoma ha il vissuto, […] e solo allora, è possibile definire "una vita intera".»

Opera divisa in tre libri, tre racconti distinti ma collegati da una rete sotterranea frutto di una macchina narrativa che Mallo congegna con perizia, inserendosi di prepotenza in quel ramo del Postmoderno che gemma dalla figura di W.G. Sebald e sembra avere al momento in M. Énard il suo esponente più rappresentativo.
I personaggi dell'opera ci portano a spasso per l'isola di San Símon, in Galizia, per le strade di New York, Miami, Los Angeles, ma anche a Cuba o lungo le coste della Normandia. Storie di moderni flâneur, che nel loro vagabondare fotografano, annusano, ascoltano, raccolgono indizi, coincidenze, simmetrie invisibili, che seguono come segugi per costruire trame che poggiano sul terreno di una guerra: quella civile spagnola, quella del Vietnam, lo sbarco in Normandia.
Storie dalle quali germogliano altre storie, nelle quali si incontrano personaggi di fantasia o reali inseriti fuori dal loro contesto e che probabilmente finiscono per confondere il lettore. Una confusione organizzata? In parte sì, ma tutto è lecito quando il risultato finale è un romanzo di altissimo livello, nel quale la guerra, il male, sono presenze costanti, l'humus sul quale germogliano pensieri, riflessioni, tentativi di tirarsi fuori da sabbie mobili dalle quali non è mai possibile affrancarsi completamente.
La memoria contro l'oblio, quindi; partendo da una frase del poeta Carlos Oroza che si ripete come un mantra per tutta la narrazione («É un errore dare per scontato ciò che fu contemplato») per dire che il passato continua a vivere nel presente. Ma non solo, perché l'altro (il vero) motore del racconto è l'immaginazione, la capacità di inventare mondi paralleli, la «trasposizione (cartarescuana?) di persone e oggetti del nostro mondo in altri leggermente deviati», curvando a piacimento le linee di spazio e tempo per dialogare, ad esempio, con García Lorca e Salvador Dalí al Central Park.
Trilogia della guerra è una pianta che guarda in alto verso l'Amore, un amore puro e totale, ma con le radici ben piantate – di nuovo – nel terreno della guerra.
Una critica dall'interno della società contemporanea, della cultura dell'effimero che propone i modelli della bellezza artificiosa, della contraffazione del corpo e dell'oblio del passato, alla quale Mallo contrappone provocatoriamente un'"estetica della spazzatura" e un nuovo umanesimo che invece di cancellare l'idea della morte, le ritaglia un ruolo centrale.

«improvvisamente penso agli epiloghi, non avevo mai pensato agli epiloghi delle cose, a ciò che sta oltre le cose, e penso […]che ogni cosa degna di esistere è stata creata per essere vista almeno due volte […], e quanto più si pensa a quel libro o a quel film, maggiori sono gli epiloghi che si sovrappongono, starti e strati di epiloghi, un'unica pila di epiloghi che si sommano senza interferire l'uno con l'altro. […] M chiedo: qual è l'epilogo di una città? O meglio ancora: qual è l'epilogo di un paese? Sospetto che l'epilogo dei paesi sia costituito da tutti i racconti, le storie più o meno fantastiche e i miti che le generazioni, una dopo l'altra, raccontano di quei paesi. Per dirlo in altro modo, sono la parte immaginaria già insita nelle cose che esistono»

«Il fatto è che la realtà è massimamente disordinata, non percepiamo mai le cose nella loro corretta sequenza temporale, per questo, anche quando parliamo o scriviamo, non rispettiamo l'ordine cronologico. La vita è un incidente aerei elevato all'ennesima potenza, la vita è una grande catastrofe, l'incidente definitivo, ed è con quel disordine che la raccontiamo.»

[David Torres · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Es un error dar por hecho lo que fue contemplado".
Hablar de este libro me resulta muy complicado, entre más lo pienso siento que son demasiadas las cosas que se me escaparon, o que no entendí, o que relaciono pero no logro del todo comprender. Esta novela está conformada por 3 partes (igual de confusas y enigmáticas) las cuales guardan entre sí conexiones inesperadas y sorprendentes, todas fruto de la casualidad. La novela en sí no es muy compleja, son diferentes personajes que pasan por situaciones aparentemente intrascendentes, pero el autor aprovecha esto para crear todo tipo de enigmas y conexiones de lo más curiosas, uniendo a sus personajes e hilando sus destinos. La novela toca todo tipo de reflexiones, algunas complejas como la Teoría de la Basura (la cual habla sobre nuestra sociedad como una construcción de residuos de nuestros antepasados), hasta más sencillas como las mascotas de las cadenas publicitarias y su existencia por fuera de los trajes. El libro está repleto de pensamientos, desvaríos y conexiones.
Es de resaltar el talento que tiene Fernández Mallo, sin duda un escritor que me interesa ampliamente, tanto por su prosa (que puede ir desde lo sentimental hasta lo científico y seguir siendo atractiva), hasta sus ideas, algunas de ellas completamente memorables y que he adoptado a mi pensamiento actual, además de que gracias a este libro empecé a escuchar a Sparklehorse, grupo que desconocía y que ahora me encanta, algo que agradezco enormemente.
Ahora, como puntos negativos:
- Varios tramos se hacen lentos, a pesar de que la escritura de Fernández Mallo no es densa, las situaciones simplemente no resultan tan atractivas; esto mejora a partir de la página 200, antes de eso es bastante confuso y parece que no va a ninguna parte.
- Los personajes no terminan de tener un encanto, lo más atrayente es sin duda lo que les sucede, pero estos, a pesar de constantemente reflexionar sobre su entorno, no lo llevan a un plano muy sentimental, o al menos yo no lo sentí de esa forma; conecté más con los sucesos que con los personajes.
- No es un libro que recomendaría a cualquiera. Su lectura, aunque no es lenta, sí que da vueltas en cosas que no a todos les llamarán la atención. Como dije antes, las primeras 200 páginas son muy extrañas y un lector que no sea paciente de seguro lo abandonará sin interés. La forma de leer este libro es interesándote en verdad por la construcción de un universo, por los detalles que el autor deja sueltos y que retoma múltiples veces, como pequeños guiños que tienes que atrapar constantemente para darle una especie de sentido a las cosas. No lo recomiendo a lectores impacientes o que necesitan que todo el tiempo suceda algo.
El final del libro recompensa si entendiste el juego que propone la novela, a continuación un gif de mi reacción:

Seguiré leyendo Agustín Fernández Mallo cuando pueda conseguir más de sus libros, aquí en Colombia son un poco caros.

[Pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

How far must a war spread before it can be termed a “world” war, I asked myself as I stood in front of the bunker door. Maybe, I thought, it’s when the war begins to have an effect on places entirely removed from the causes of the conflict.

[Alberto Delgado · Rating 4 out of 5]

En la contraportada de este libro para venderlo nos dicen que esta novela es como si W.G. Sebald y David Lynch se hubieran aliado para desvelarnos la cara B de nuestra sociedad. La verdad es que no he leído todavía ningún libro de Sebald por lo que no puedo corroborar esta frase pero tengo que decir que lo de David Lynch si lo subscribo y desde luego tengo un nuevo autor pendiente de leer tras la semblanza que hace el propio Fernandez Mallo de Sebald en la última parte de la novela. Si me ha recordado a mi a otros autores como Auster o Bolaño. Un libro magnifico que te engancha desde la primera página en este universo paralelo creado en el que las guerras del siglo xx sirven de unión entre los tres relatos que forman la novela para reflejar la complejidad de nuestro tiempo y nuestro desamparo en él como individuos. Tengo que decir que no le he dado un 5 por la tercera parte del libro que no me ha enganchado como las dos primeras pero sin duda es un libro brillante , hipnótico y complejo,de esos que hay que volver a releer para descubrir cosas que sin duda en una primera lectura se habrán pasado y que al volver a leerlo serán descubiertas.

[Massimiliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Questo non è affatto un romanzo classico e si capisce subito. Non c’è una vera trama né personaggi a cui affezionarsi nel modo abituale, ma una serie di frammenti, immagini e situazioni che sembrano messe lì senza spiegazioni. All’inizio spiazza parecchio e più volte mi sono chiesto dove stesse andando a parare, però pagina dopo pagina ti accorgi che il senso non sta nel capire tutto, ma nel restare dentro quello che stai leggendo.

Man mano emerge l’idea di una “guerra” che non è fatta di battaglie, ma di attriti continui: tra persone, tecnologia, memoria, linguaggio, mondo reale e rappresentazione. Mallo mescola scienza, arte e riflessioni sul presente in modo strano ma sorprendentemente efficace. È un libro che non ti prende per mano e non ti rassicura, ma riesce a restituire bene la sensazione di vivere in un mondo confuso, frammentato e sempre in tensione.

La cosa che mi ha colpito di più è che, una volta finito, il libro continua a lavorarti dentro. Non è una lettura facile né immediata, ma più ci penso e più mi rendo conto che è stata una delle migliori letture dell’anno. Di quelle che magari non ami subito, ma che ti restano addosso e ti fanno guardare le cose in modo leggermente diverso.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird and Brilliant

Might not human beings themselves by the result of an incessant counterfeiting, genes upon genes, all of which are nothing but very slightly altered copies?

For me, New York City was already the last medieval city of the Modern Era, like seeing Pompeii just before the volcanic erupted.

This novel contains three separate stories that interact. In weirdness, it was like watching three episodes of the TV show Twilight Zone back-to-back and having each show repeat, in totally different circumstances, something in each of the others. Each story was brilliant in and of itself but collectively they were even better. The book is complicated and confusing but oh so good.

I learned history I did not know, as there are very true historical happenings and people in this book. But what a different, and fictional, way to look at this history.

My GR friends and those I follow have written some excellent reviews (see Paul Fucher's -https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., Neil's - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., and Jeremy's - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and I encourage reading them. Mine isn't going to tell you much other than that the book was brilliant.

The style of this book - rambling, long sentences, few paragraph breaks - is one I do not particularly care for, but here it is brilliant. It took me almost 2 weeks to read, even though it is 12 pages shy of 500 pages. I had to concentrate and a half hour at a time was about the maximum. Many nights I fell asleep reading and would have to back up some when I came back to it, but that was fine as I always picked up something new. This may well be a book I reread. It almost demands it. If I'd finished this on December 31, as I had hoped, it might well have been my favorite book of 2021.

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

Un Sebald descafeinado, pretencioso y que no para de congratularse por su propia elocuencia y las metáforas pseudo-intelectuales que hacen del texto uno farragoso e innecesario. Es una lástima, porque la historia de la isla de San Simón es una interesante y que tal vez en otro relato podría haber sido maravillosa; sin embargo, Fernández Mallo se pierde en esa forma que tiene de írsele la fuerza por la boca. No entiendo el éxito que ha cosechado pero, en cierto modo, tampoco me sorprende en un panorama narrativo que ha hecho de Patria o el Vargas Llosa tardío su seña de identidad más llamativa.

[Eteocles · Rating 3 out of 5]

La primera parte es sensacional, la segunda se pierde y se hace terriblemente tediosa y para cuando la tercera quiere hacer de la trilogía un todo, es demasiado tarde. Aun así, es una gozada leer los constantes regalos narrativos, imaginarios y científicos con los que nos regala página tras página. Es un libro árido de leer, pero que depara muchas satisfacciones en cada página a los que nos gusta disfrutar con algo muy bien escrito y pensado.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memory, the Diachronic Mirror

"Isn’t it true that mirrors always entail lapses in time, given the time it takes for light to travel any distance?"

Even more amazing than the rich texture of this feast of a novel is the deceptively readable (as he puts it: scientifically clear) style Mallo employs to explore his themes: memory, stories, interconnectedness, authenticity. No wonder the author of Compass, Énard speaks so highly of this Spanish writer.

The three interlaced narratives called books function like a map of human interconnectedness. War and narrative are key elements in each of the three (echoes of Zone ?): vestiges of the Spanish Civil War visited by a writer; the Vietnam War recalled by the aging fictitious fourth astronaut on Neil Armstrong’s team; D-Day revived by a young woman on her walking tour of Norman beaches.

As the threads connecting these three sections are revealed in a satisfying way, Mallo debunks the usual myths relating to memory. Albeit not explicitly, Mallo transposes lévinasian ethics, i.e. the condemnation of sameness and the celebration of otherness, to narration. Storytelling is diachronic, transformative reflection, not a mechanic reiteration, because “sameness is a thing that reduces and weakens”. But sameness is impossible in human history. Even

“a repetition doesn’t bring about a law or a norm but instead makes the repeated thing all the more singular, like the species evolving in reverse.”

Memory does not preserve, but alters. Narrative mutations, or “slight deviations from reality”, are ingrained in history. Small details – too many to point out – are reiterated in Mallo’s frolicking intratextual play as he introduces his own slight mutation of history, making up the story of a fourth astronaut among those who first landed on moon.

This is no praise of progressivism, but a wholesome way to show the balance between change and constancy: “for a transformation to take place something has to remain the same.”
Our sebaldesque narrators, inevitably, philosophize about language, the primary carrier of memory between generations. Whereas the writer in the first section wonders what happens when a language, “the manifestation, the reflection, of a profoundly religious structure greater than it”, becomes extinct and unrecyclable, the protagonist of the closing section concludes

“there’s no such thing as a dead language, any such claim is like saying that the dead don’t live on in us, when it’s beyond doubt that the dead tend to be far more present in our day to day than any living person.”

It’s precisely this diachronic aperture of human existence that repressive authorities try to close up, our writer realizes as he notices that

“in conditions of isolation, there’s a tendency for bodies and brains to meld together into a single consciousness, into a receptacle for identical reagents.”

Individuality is annulled in isolation. In an unforgettably fine scene, Mallo breaks the solitary writer’s isolation by opening the metaphysical dimension for him. As he reflects on all these in an abandoned church, the writer feels being drawn under the protection of the saint with stolen hands (which will resurface, again protectively, in the third narration), who prevents the history-laden island from absorbing the writer.

The metaphysical function of memory is made explicit in the second narrative: “hell is for the unremembered”. In the same way as judgment day is “God’s account of the corporeal universe”, human memory also acquires an eschatological dimension, because it constantly puts together the elements of the past, “the things we’ve seen” into a narrative that is constantly actualized. Memory, however, is not an abstract affair. The role of corporeality is highlighted in all the three narratives. In the first, trash, the unintended remnants of human existence, is analyzed in funny detail involving Salvador Dalí. In the second, the link between corporeality and memory appears in the amusing tradition whereby sons are expected to extract a wood chip from their fathers’ coffin. The third narrative closes the loop, when the missing hands of the saint of the first narrative show up.

The fine criticism of abstraction is not a self-serving authorial gimmick:

“There is nothing worse than ideas and the fickle way they have of mutating… ideas cannot be touched or drawn or captured in a photograph either.”

It is in fact a tribute to life, to the lives of all who ever lived, and – with another humorous intertextual touch – to the lives lost to virtuality: “I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook.”

[Freca - Narrazioni da Divano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Testo postmoderno, facile da leggere e complesso da assimilare. Tre storie, un unico file rouge, dove succede poco o niente: i protagonisti, che parlano a presa diretta con il lettore, fanno cose, vedono gente, si muovono nello spazio e nel tempo senza che la trama faccia mai da protagonista. Echi di guerre che hanno segnato e definito in molto modi, sia personali e sociali, il novecento mondiale qua soprattutto dal punto di vista occidentale (europeo-statunitense), mai in primo piano ma sempre pesantemente protagoniste con i loro miasmi. La memoria, il passato che si fonde con il presente facendosi radice e prolungandosi tramite si esso sono i protagonisti indiscussi delle narrazioni dei tre personaggi. Pienissimo di riferimento a grandi classici del genere da Cortázar a Sebald, nominati o solo allusi.
Uno stile interessante, che sicuramente approfondirò seppure non così spinto come poteva essere.
Personalmente il primo racconto è stato quello che ho preferito.

[Miglė · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most toxic relationship I had with a book this year. I like the 'Spanish-style' (?) spiraling writing, the flow of thought, where the same slightly surreal motives keep coming back, interweaving with new motives, pushing the story forward, but it the end it doesn't really go anywhere. What annoyed me was the (maybe perceived) PRETENTIOUSNESS of the whole ordeal, it often seemed that the author was just showing off and some sections (like the monologue of Dali) felt like completely separate pieces that the author has decided to just squeeze in, because why not. There was a bit of a preachy vibe sometimes and I didn't buy the female character at all. It was a wild, and sometimes fun, ride and I'm glad that it ended.

[Ian Gillibrand · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly satisfying experience taking in everything from the Spanish Civil War internment camps, turn of the century New York life and its consumerism and shallowness, the D Day beaches of Normandy and an overall feeling of the incomprehensible nature of life.

Masterful language which veers between a journalistic and a magical realist style across three distinct separate narratives kept me entranced to the end.

A joy to read.

[mela✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Per chi ama i libri fatti da storie dentro altre storie e personaggi bizzarri; per chi ama Lorca e Sebald e Bolaño; per chi ama leggere libri in cui perdersi senza avere la certezza di arrivare necessariamente da qualche parte; per chi ama lasciarsi trasportare dalle parole e seguire la corrente.

[Nico Boon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wat een plezier om dit boek te lezen! Het is wild, avontuurlijk, verrassend en vreemd. Je weet echt nooit wat te verwachten. Op den duur begin je te denken: "wat gaat Mallo nu weer uit zijn mouw schudden?". Op het eerste gezicht gaat het boek over de sporen van oorlog in samenleving, landschap, mensenlevens... Maar het gaat over zoveel meer, zoveel zelfs dat ik niet zou kunnen zeggen waarover het nu precies gaat. En dat vind ik absoluut niet erg.

Trilogie van de Oorlog is een spiegelpaleis aan beelden, personages en verhalen. En verhalen in verhalen in verhalen. Je verdwaalt als lezer, je hebt plezier als lezer, je ergert je als lezer, je bent ontroerd als lezer, je leert bij als lezer, en soms heb je momenten van subliem inzicht waarop alles steek lijkt te houden. En het volgende moment schudt Mallo dus weer iets nieuws uit zijn mouw. En blijf je verward, verweesd, gebiologeerd achter.

Mallo is een meester in het schijnbaar achteloos scheppen van rake beelden (schijnbaar want niets is zeker in het universum van Mallo: wat achteloos lijkt kan wel eens terug opduiken). Het effect dat dit boek op mij heeft, is dat het je visie op "de werkelijkheid" ontregelt. Wat vanzelfsprekend lijkt, hoeft dat zeker niet te zijn.

Misschien is het enkel voor hardcore literatuurliefhebbers, dat kan ik mij voorstellen. Je moet tegen een portie vervreemding en uitweiding kunnen, wil je dit kunnen smaken.

Trilogie van de Oorlog doet mij denken aan - of course - Sebald, Lynch, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Egan, Vila-Matas en Foster Wallace. Maar ik heb echt het gevoel iets "van nu" gelezen te hebben. Iets wat ik nog niet vaak gelezen heb.

Een boeiende (eindeloze?) Rubik´s Cube, dit boek. Een kleine 500 pagina's aan avontuur.

[Olivia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Escribo mis reviews en https://sinrumbofijo.home.blog

Este libro hizo cuestionarme si valía o no la pena terminar las lecturas que no me están gustando o me están aburriendo, incluso pedí consejo a algunos amigos y varios recomendaron abandonar y no perder el tiempo, a lo que yo contesté que yo siempre había preferido terminar por una cuestión de disciplina y porque, en dado caso, no podría dar una opinión válida sobre él si no lo acababa. La realidad es que decidí saltarme algunas páginas de la segunda parte y darlo por finalizado haciendo un escaneo rápido de las últimas veinte páginas.

Me dejé llevar como normalmente hago, por el título y la contraportada; el tema de los conflictos bélicos es uno de mis favoritos, y haciendo caso de la descripción iba a ser interesante conocer la relación entre tres muy diferentes: la Guerra Civil Española, la Guerra en Vietnam y la Segunda Guerra Mundial: decepción… Sí, decepción es la que me llevé porque el libro apenas menciona el tema de las guerras. Los eventos no suceden en ellas, sino aparecen como meras referencias en los tres relatos personales, introspectivos y exhaustivamente descriptivos que suceden en la época actual de tres diferentes personajes y que el autor conecta con algunos datos aleatorios y casi sin sentido que menciona en todas las historias, pero sin gran fondo.

La primera parte prometía entretenimiento y fue la única que logró llamar mi atención aunque me costó mucho asimilar de qué iba cuando el relato se centró en la isla de San Simón en la isla de Galicia, la cual fue ocupada como campo de concentración para prisioneros opositores al Franquismo. La segunda parte menciona la Guerra de Vietnam desde el punto de vista de un veterano de la misma que más bien parece perdido en sus recuerdos y disparatadas y aburridas reflexiones, por lo que, honestamente, no pude terminarla. La tercera es narrada por la que resulta pareja del primer personaje y pasea por las playas de Normandía para cumplir la última petición que le fue solicitada cuando aquel desapareció sin aviso previo y desarrolla una minuciosa descripción de todo (¡todo!) lo que ve, oye, huele, piensa y se imagina; pone en palabras cada minúsculo detalle de lo que suele pasar por nuestras mentes en segundos, de los cuales, la mayoría son descartables y eso es lo que hacemos normalmente, descartar casi todo lo que en realidad no nos está aportando en cualquier situación; eso no lo hace este autor.

El libro me pareció un cúmulo de desvaríos e introspecciones inconexas que no llegaron a ninguna parte, la mayoría sin sentido e inútiles desde mi perspectiva, sólo un par que me valieron la pena subrayar, pero al final, una lectura que hubiera podido ahorrarme. Desperdicié mucho tiempo intentando entrar en las historias, comprender el rumbo de los relatos y pensamientos, para que resultara mayormente en aburrimiento y pérdida completa del interés.

[Anthony]

Imagine you are going to see a magician. He’s standing there with this black hat, and you know he’s going to pull something out of it. You can’t wait. Instead of tricks, the magician talks about his dreams, which are boring. Hours of your life pass. Your son learns to use his hands, to babble. You still think the magician might pull something out of his hat, but he doesn’t.

I know I’m maturing as a person because I quit on this book. Life is too short for this noodly diet bolano bullshit.

[Javier Avilés · Rating 3 out of 5]

Por una parte me ha parecido interesante y muy bien estructurada. Por otra no aporta nada nuevo. Creo que es deliberado pues la esencia de la novela es la imitación, la recreación. Mallo dice Sebald, yo digo Auster.
En cierta manera decepcionante... interesantemente decepcionante.