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Valencia
A man checks into a hotel in a Mediterranean city on the banks of the Turia.
He is far from home. He holds few possessions. Enough clothing for a week, money for drink. A few essential paperbacks, a cigar box of old photographs. He intends to commit suicide. But somewhere along the way he gets lost in the churn of memory.
"Valencia" is an elegiac and hallucinatory meditation on beauty, loss, and how memory is deceitful, even when photographs are involved.
The things we carry come from an infinite sadness. That sadness is the death of childhood.
_________
Did you ever stumble across a writer who seems to have lived your life and inhabited your dreams, your darkest moods? This happened to me, and I hope it will happen to you as you read through the mesmerizing pages of James Nulick's "Valencia.".. Nulick has inherited, from Zola, from Celine, from Burroughs maybe, something of the sweetness that lingers when everything extant has died of rot. His book will live forever in the literature of truth and waste.
- Kevin Killian, author of "Spreadeagle"
The prose of Valencia is delicately simple yet densely poetic. Its voice is haunting. I couldn't help being reminded by every line I read in James Nulick's novel of Garcia Lorca's famous "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias" and its chilling refrain: "At five o'clock in the afternoon."
- Thomas Ligotti, author of "The Conspiracy against the Human Race"
He is far from home. He holds few possessions. Enough clothing for a week, money for drink. A few essential paperbacks, a cigar box of old photographs. He intends to commit suicide. But somewhere along the way he gets lost in the churn of memory.
"Valencia" is an elegiac and hallucinatory meditation on beauty, loss, and how memory is deceitful, even when photographs are involved.
The things we carry come from an infinite sadness. That sadness is the death of childhood.
_________
Did you ever stumble across a writer who seems to have lived your life and inhabited your dreams, your darkest moods? This happened to me, and I hope it will happen to you as you read through the mesmerizing pages of James Nulick's "Valencia.".. Nulick has inherited, from Zola, from Celine, from Burroughs maybe, something of the sweetness that lingers when everything extant has died of rot. His book will live forever in the literature of truth and waste.
- Kevin Killian, author of "Spreadeagle"
The prose of Valencia is delicately simple yet densely poetic. Its voice is haunting. I couldn't help being reminded by every line I read in James Nulick's novel of Garcia Lorca's famous "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias" and its chilling refrain: "At five o'clock in the afternoon."
- Thomas Ligotti, author of "The Conspiracy against the Human Race"
300 pages, Paperback
First published August 19, 2015
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355 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 22, 2022
"My history is simple enough. It is the history of all those who have come before me, and those who will come after. It is a history that is often much too heavy to bear. The weight builds, the structure collapses. The final refusal to carry this history is called Death. Eventually, we all refuse."
August 22, 2025
My childhood was a series of hexagons. Honeybees stored food and raised their young in hexagonal cells. Pigeons clucked and fluttered behind hexagonal wire. School lessons were written using a hexagon-shaped pencil. I mapped the world in my bedroom. Everything in it could be contained in seven hundred and twenty degrees.
February 5, 2016
It’s hard to write an American memoir in the year of our Lord, 2016. Modernity has caused most of us to live unremarkable lives. No more surviving small pox or famine. Not a lot of terrain to discover that doesn’t already have several Taco Bell locations within a fifty-mile radius. No invaders from foreign lands, no wars on American soil. No duels, few remaining sexy hippie cults waiting to indoctrinate the young and innocent, and even those who have fled to large cities in order to carve out an interesting career in the arts while living with lots of interesting people in a bohemian slum are more likely to micro-blog about binge watching some fucking show about women having lots of implausible sex in a prison than their latest attempt at creating a mural or a novel or an interesting sculpture. The bulk of lives these day are completely unremarkable but sometimes reading about unremarkable lives can be interesting, if the life in question rings true to the reader, offering muffled catharsis for the quiet depression that is so much a part of modern ennui.
Don’t get me wrong – suburbia has a lot to recommend it but it doesn’t lend itself well to the creation of great memoirs unless we have something really and truly nasty lurking behind the scenes, and those things happen to us rather than being experiences we seek out. Good modern memoirists need at least one crazy or alcoholic parent, one unsettling example of sexual abuse, a slowly developing drug addiction, and maybe, if such a writer is lucky, one of his family members will commit a terrible crime or get killed in the course of a terrible crime and then he’ll be rolling in the life experiences that make up the modern memoir.
But even if one has these qualifiers, so do many others. If one is going to write a memoir about a prosaic life, even one with requisite misery, one needs to be a very good writer because otherwise the readers will be tempted to say, “Shitty parents, stranger touched me, drugs during college, terrible job, why am I reading this when I can clearly write my own memoir because everyone in the benighted Generation X more or less lived the same fucking life.”
Nulick takes his cues from all three categories: he’s lived a life that seems all too common to most Americans; he has catastrophic life experiences that make for interesting reading and a certain prurient rubbernecking; and he is a very good writer, profoundly good at times. We recognize Nulick’s life as our own in some respects, we are appalled at some of the things that happen to Nulick, and we are drawn in and held in by his unique and near-poetic style.
I mentioned this before in an entry closing out 2015, but it bears repeating. The way that Nulick writes reminds me of conversations one has with an old friend. You know this person well, but you haven’t spoken in a while. Your friend mentions an incident or a person in the course of telling a story, thinking that you know all about that incident or person. You don’t know, but you don’t interrupt because your friend is on a roll and you feel certain that in a moment you can either interject and ask a question or your friend will throw you enough clues in the conversation that you can piece it together. Sometimes you realize the information isn’t important enough to interrupt, because the point of the story isn’t about that person or place – it was just mentioned as an aside in the course of a larger topic.
This is how Nulick writes. Sometimes he mentions a name before we know who that person is. The first time this happened I wondered if I had overlooked the person as I read and I almost backtracked in order to find the original mention that I was sure I had missed. It can be a bit odd if you begin reading this book unaware that Nulick writes this way, treating you like an old friend listening to a long conversation about his life, but once you are knowledgeable about this method of story-telling, it feels completely normal, almost comfortable. You feel like you are being drawn into Nulick’s story in a manner that implies that he considers you a trusted friend, and that’s an unusual feeling when reading a memoir. I’ve often felt some commonality with memoirists as I read their works but this takes that feeling of knowing an author in a direction I can’t recall ever having read before. You may want to read this book through once and then read it again a week or so later. That second read cements that feeling of being a friend because you now feel like an insider to Nulick’s story.
That sense of commonality takes you only so far, though. I find it interesting how many books about Gen-X men have come across my radar lately and how I respond to them. In Ann Sterzinger’s NVSQVAM, the protagonist Lester is utterly lost and a complete asshole, but as I mention in my discussion, he’s our asshole, my generation’s asshole. It’s hard to hate your brother even when he’s a prick. It’s irrational to hate a child you may have created but Baby Boomers despair of me and mine, and for some reason we all seem to be poking Millennials with a stick as if we didn’t fucking make the world they were born into, like we didn’t raise them or mold them into the people they are now. Yet Nulick, in as much as this memoir accurately reflects his real life, at times inspired in me the same nose-pinching desire I felt toward Sterzinger’s Lester. I just wanted to smack him as he artistically destroyed his life, almost as if he was modeling his destruction on those who came before him and set the example for the lost, dissolute, addicted writer.
Quick synopsis: According to my own interpretation of this book, a young man has gone to a Spanish hotel called Hotel Valencia. He has chosen this hotel because he recalls fondly a boy with the name Valencia. He has taken plenty of reading material and a box of pictures. This young man has AIDS, and I ultimately decided he had gone there less to die from his illness than to commit suicide (edit on 1/13/16 – as I was entering data for this book in book sites, I glanced at the back cover blurb wherein it spells out clearly that the protagonist was committing suicide and not passively dying, so, you know, my bad!). This story begins at the end, so to speak, and Nulick tells versions of his life, in no particular order. Or perhaps he is telling stories in the order in which he looks at the pictures he keeps in that box. Random stories that all end up linking together to tell the whole of the story of Nulick’s life and how he came to be the man in the hotel room, ready to die. Because this book’s content is peripatetic, it makes a true synopsis difficult, and while this is definitely not an Everyman tale, there are pieces of it that are familiar. There is a grubbiness to this memoir that reminds me of the movies Slacker and ET. Yes, ET. ET was such a grubby film in certain respects – shambolic house, improvised meals in a home filled with candy and treat foods, distracted mother, fractured family, the children living a life wholly separate from the adults. This was a part of Valencia – unprepared parents, fractured families creating extended relationships, some good and some bad, a lost writer, a boy struggling to find his place, a homosexual man trying to find his way, an asshole writer destroying himself, a little boy living with a grubby father in a grubby trailer. Again, I have no idea how much of this is exactly a representation of Nulick’s real life, so bear that in mind as I discuss this book. (I noted as I edited this discussion that when I am speaking of James Nulick the writer, I refer to him as Nulick. When I refer to James Nulick, the character in this book, I call him James. I think I did this unconsciously because I am genuinely unsure what content in this book is true and what is not.)
You can read my extremely long discussion here.
Don’t get me wrong – suburbia has a lot to recommend it but it doesn’t lend itself well to the creation of great memoirs unless we have something really and truly nasty lurking behind the scenes, and those things happen to us rather than being experiences we seek out. Good modern memoirists need at least one crazy or alcoholic parent, one unsettling example of sexual abuse, a slowly developing drug addiction, and maybe, if such a writer is lucky, one of his family members will commit a terrible crime or get killed in the course of a terrible crime and then he’ll be rolling in the life experiences that make up the modern memoir.
But even if one has these qualifiers, so do many others. If one is going to write a memoir about a prosaic life, even one with requisite misery, one needs to be a very good writer because otherwise the readers will be tempted to say, “Shitty parents, stranger touched me, drugs during college, terrible job, why am I reading this when I can clearly write my own memoir because everyone in the benighted Generation X more or less lived the same fucking life.”
Nulick takes his cues from all three categories: he’s lived a life that seems all too common to most Americans; he has catastrophic life experiences that make for interesting reading and a certain prurient rubbernecking; and he is a very good writer, profoundly good at times. We recognize Nulick’s life as our own in some respects, we are appalled at some of the things that happen to Nulick, and we are drawn in and held in by his unique and near-poetic style.
I mentioned this before in an entry closing out 2015, but it bears repeating. The way that Nulick writes reminds me of conversations one has with an old friend. You know this person well, but you haven’t spoken in a while. Your friend mentions an incident or a person in the course of telling a story, thinking that you know all about that incident or person. You don’t know, but you don’t interrupt because your friend is on a roll and you feel certain that in a moment you can either interject and ask a question or your friend will throw you enough clues in the conversation that you can piece it together. Sometimes you realize the information isn’t important enough to interrupt, because the point of the story isn’t about that person or place – it was just mentioned as an aside in the course of a larger topic.
This is how Nulick writes. Sometimes he mentions a name before we know who that person is. The first time this happened I wondered if I had overlooked the person as I read and I almost backtracked in order to find the original mention that I was sure I had missed. It can be a bit odd if you begin reading this book unaware that Nulick writes this way, treating you like an old friend listening to a long conversation about his life, but once you are knowledgeable about this method of story-telling, it feels completely normal, almost comfortable. You feel like you are being drawn into Nulick’s story in a manner that implies that he considers you a trusted friend, and that’s an unusual feeling when reading a memoir. I’ve often felt some commonality with memoirists as I read their works but this takes that feeling of knowing an author in a direction I can’t recall ever having read before. You may want to read this book through once and then read it again a week or so later. That second read cements that feeling of being a friend because you now feel like an insider to Nulick’s story.
That sense of commonality takes you only so far, though. I find it interesting how many books about Gen-X men have come across my radar lately and how I respond to them. In Ann Sterzinger’s NVSQVAM, the protagonist Lester is utterly lost and a complete asshole, but as I mention in my discussion, he’s our asshole, my generation’s asshole. It’s hard to hate your brother even when he’s a prick. It’s irrational to hate a child you may have created but Baby Boomers despair of me and mine, and for some reason we all seem to be poking Millennials with a stick as if we didn’t fucking make the world they were born into, like we didn’t raise them or mold them into the people they are now. Yet Nulick, in as much as this memoir accurately reflects his real life, at times inspired in me the same nose-pinching desire I felt toward Sterzinger’s Lester. I just wanted to smack him as he artistically destroyed his life, almost as if he was modeling his destruction on those who came before him and set the example for the lost, dissolute, addicted writer.
Quick synopsis: According to my own interpretation of this book, a young man has gone to a Spanish hotel called Hotel Valencia. He has chosen this hotel because he recalls fondly a boy with the name Valencia. He has taken plenty of reading material and a box of pictures. This young man has AIDS, and I ultimately decided he had gone there less to die from his illness than to commit suicide (edit on 1/13/16 – as I was entering data for this book in book sites, I glanced at the back cover blurb wherein it spells out clearly that the protagonist was committing suicide and not passively dying, so, you know, my bad!). This story begins at the end, so to speak, and Nulick tells versions of his life, in no particular order. Or perhaps he is telling stories in the order in which he looks at the pictures he keeps in that box. Random stories that all end up linking together to tell the whole of the story of Nulick’s life and how he came to be the man in the hotel room, ready to die. Because this book’s content is peripatetic, it makes a true synopsis difficult, and while this is definitely not an Everyman tale, there are pieces of it that are familiar. There is a grubbiness to this memoir that reminds me of the movies Slacker and ET. Yes, ET. ET was such a grubby film in certain respects – shambolic house, improvised meals in a home filled with candy and treat foods, distracted mother, fractured family, the children living a life wholly separate from the adults. This was a part of Valencia – unprepared parents, fractured families creating extended relationships, some good and some bad, a lost writer, a boy struggling to find his place, a homosexual man trying to find his way, an asshole writer destroying himself, a little boy living with a grubby father in a grubby trailer. Again, I have no idea how much of this is exactly a representation of Nulick’s real life, so bear that in mind as I discuss this book. (I noted as I edited this discussion that when I am speaking of James Nulick the writer, I refer to him as Nulick. When I refer to James Nulick, the character in this book, I call him James. I think I did this unconsciously because I am genuinely unsure what content in this book is true and what is not.)
You can read my extremely long discussion here.
May 2, 2017
A man checks into a hotel with no intention of checking out. We are treated to the sad litany of abuses and failures that led him to this end. Thirteen hundred reasons why, if you will. Valencia follows a path trodden by some of the heaviest of literary heavyweights. Dostoyevski, Gogol, Hamsun, Celine, Burroughs, just to name a few, have all written unforgettable portraits of man unravelled. James Nulick, even while acknowledging a long list of literary heroes, manages to place an offering of unique virtue at the altar of human misery.
The narrator here is laid low and completely bare. He catalogues the heartbreaks and indignities that characterized his childhood and beyond in a voice without ego - a voice reinforced by Nulick's doggedly sparse prose. The effect is harrowing.
Our hero was an orphan, an alien among his childhood peers. He quickly ascertains that his sexuality is something to hide, and, throughout the book, is never able to forgive himself for who he is. His young adulthood is marked by epic self-destruction. Ultimately, he contracts AIDS. In the end . . . well, I won't say. Anyway, what is a happy ending? We can each only experience a true ending once, and we take that knowledge with us.
Nulick's tale unfolds via his narrator's leafing through a box of old photographs. Thus the chronology of the story telescopes at random. In the way that a photograph offers only a surface representation of a moment, these trips back in time inspire often contradictory memories. This is only in keeping with the roller-coaster reality of life's journey. The one constant here is the narrator's refusal to believe in his own value. Nulick's ascetic prose, eschewing every adornment of passion, is chilling in its apparent genuineness.
If all this doesn't seem like your cup of tea, you're probably right. But I consider this book a gift, and Nulick a brave sentry sending word from the dark edges of the human experience. If you are content to sound proof your life against the howls of the gaunt and moon-mad, that's fine; Nicholas Sparks is writing a book for you right now!
The narrator here is laid low and completely bare. He catalogues the heartbreaks and indignities that characterized his childhood and beyond in a voice without ego - a voice reinforced by Nulick's doggedly sparse prose. The effect is harrowing.
Our hero was an orphan, an alien among his childhood peers. He quickly ascertains that his sexuality is something to hide, and, throughout the book, is never able to forgive himself for who he is. His young adulthood is marked by epic self-destruction. Ultimately, he contracts AIDS. In the end . . . well, I won't say. Anyway, what is a happy ending? We can each only experience a true ending once, and we take that knowledge with us.
Nulick's tale unfolds via his narrator's leafing through a box of old photographs. Thus the chronology of the story telescopes at random. In the way that a photograph offers only a surface representation of a moment, these trips back in time inspire often contradictory memories. This is only in keeping with the roller-coaster reality of life's journey. The one constant here is the narrator's refusal to believe in his own value. Nulick's ascetic prose, eschewing every adornment of passion, is chilling in its apparent genuineness.
If all this doesn't seem like your cup of tea, you're probably right. But I consider this book a gift, and Nulick a brave sentry sending word from the dark edges of the human experience. If you are content to sound proof your life against the howls of the gaunt and moon-mad, that's fine; Nicholas Sparks is writing a book for you right now!
June 10, 2016
When a book has been endorsed by both Kevin Killian and Thomas Ligotti, you just know that it'll most likely be pretty good, and "Valencia" doesn't disappoint. The premise of the book is disarmingly simple, though most of it is related in a non-chronological manner: an unidentified gay man slowly dying of AIDS takes a trip to a foreign hotel with the intention of committing suicide. But he gets sidetracked while exploring a box of his old photographs, each photograph serving as a trigger to a particular memory from his past. These non-linear memories make up the bulk of the book, and do a good job of illustrating the backstory of the unnamed narrator: by the book's end I felt like I really knew the guy and missed his voice. But my favorite thing about the book is the prose. There are a lot of really great artful sentences and poetic similes in this work. To give a few examples:
"The beauty of time, if there is such a thing, is that it erases everything."
"I was born a happy baby, but then I started breathing."
"Death is a library with all the lights turned off."
"The heart is a twisted knot whose mysteries are seldom undone."
"The blue veins pulsing at her temples reminded me of ice on Mars."
"I opened the box as a cardiologist would open a patient's chest."
"After the fireworks of a life, it all ends quietly among grass and stone."
"Young men are rude, pushing their penises through the ice of the world."
Anyway, it's one of the best novels that I've read in awhile now and I highly recommend it.
"The beauty of time, if there is such a thing, is that it erases everything."
"I was born a happy baby, but then I started breathing."
"Death is a library with all the lights turned off."
"The heart is a twisted knot whose mysteries are seldom undone."
"The blue veins pulsing at her temples reminded me of ice on Mars."
"I opened the box as a cardiologist would open a patient's chest."
"After the fireworks of a life, it all ends quietly among grass and stone."
"Young men are rude, pushing their penises through the ice of the world."
Anyway, it's one of the best novels that I've read in awhile now and I highly recommend it.
January 19, 2016
Valencia is a beautifully written poetic novel about growing up, facing death, regret, and so many other things. You may find yourself remembering different things when you finish reading it, but you'll remember it vividly. I highly recommend this book.
FULL REVIEW
FULL REVIEW
May 15, 2021
This novel held a gnawing legend status in my consciousness before I even read it. "Have you read Valencia?" wasn't just a question, but an inquisitive mantra echoing through my head from those who smothered it with what seemed like hyperbole, statements like "it changed my life." Ten pages in I immediately grasped its high praise — its perfectly constructed sentences, immaculately edited chronicling a man checking into a hotel with no intentions of checking out, left only with his memories that end up saving him. Yet, there's no bullshit redemption ending, just an extreme beauty in the matter of fact — that we are born from oblivion, we live in oblivion, then hopefully when the time is right, we die in oblivion; that we must savor all the in-between, even at its most mundane — because what do we have to show for ourselves besides our memories?
Nulick is one of those rare authors who, just by reading him, has taught me just how good writing can get, something to strive for. We're lucky he's alive among us.
Nulick is one of those rare authors who, just by reading him, has taught me just how good writing can get, something to strive for. We're lucky he's alive among us.
November 18, 2021
Ik heb zelden zo’n messcherp portret gelezen van intergenerationeel trauma, verslaving en teleurstelling als Valencia van James Nulick. In korte hoofdstukken en schitterende observaties ontleed hij zijn kindertijd en herinneringen, terwijl hij in een anoniem Spaans hotel wegkwijnt. Ik hoop in de toekomst meer van Nulick te mogen lezen.
September 30, 2019
AMAZING if I could marry an object it would be this book.Beautifully written.Actually got lost in the book several times like reading my own journal from the 70s and 80s.5STAR READ
July 12, 2019
this book is awesome. there might be a bit of a curve, depending on your need for winding sentences (they are a rarity here), but the narrative quickly builds power. the prose is direct but also generous; there are such killer lines on every page, heavy, insightful lines that kick. the story is nonlinear but the power of the writing gives it an intuitive sense/flow. each vignette is vivid (sometimes even nightmarish) and authentic and lays down a complicated network of brokenness that leads to an ambiguous end. or maybe a definitive end. whatever the case, it's all there in the sentences, perhaps the only things that matter.
August 28, 2018
Interesting and haunting character study of a young man with AIDS who checks into a hotel in a foreign country to commit suicide, but gets lost in his own memories with a box of photographs. The story is told in a series of memories on the subject of each picture, short memories with sometimes vague and sometimes vivid details, emotional impressions and hazy remembrances. It is a very different kind of story, told in a unique way. Some of the images and subject matter are difficult, not an easy read, somewhat intense in places so be prepared.
February 10, 2021
Not at all what I expected, really loved this book. The author writes in a way that really comes across to me. Many things in this book, I could relate to on a personal level. Eager to read more from this author.
December 8, 2025
"How much is a life worth if it doesn't end?"
Nulick's words are beautiful. A true, poetic story.
When I saw five-star reviews from some GR friends whose opinions I value, I knew I had to read Valencia.
They were right: This book is wonderfully written, and though it is not the kind of story I usually read, I couldn't put it down.
I don't know why I was so moved.
There are a lot of citations I could put in this review but it's surely better for you to read the whole book.
The last paragraph is extraordinary. 🌺.
November 18, 2022
beautiful bummer
February 5, 2025
Some beautiful sentences. The beginning of this book is incredible. I loved the story it was hard but the writing is gorgeous.
August 14, 2025
Nulick’s prose is like a million weightless roses - many light beauties.
September 6, 2022
Don't worry any longer, James Nulick explains life in this book. Not his, yours, mine, not anyone's precisely. What he's accomplished here is a microcosm comprising multitudes. There is no need to divulge the plot points, the specificities, please just read the official summary and pick up a copy. If you read you will love it. If not, get it just to put on your bookshelf and appear cool. I've heard people have done that before.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews