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Lost Empress
From the author of the acclaimed, PEN/Bingham Prize-winning A Naked Singularity; a shockingly hilarious novel that tackles, with equal aplomb, both America's most popular sport and its criminal justice system.
From Paterson, New Jersey to Rikers Island to the streets of New York City, Sergio De La Pava's Lost Empress introduces readers to a cast of characters unlike any other in modern fiction: dreamers and exiles, immigrants and night-shift workers, lonely pastors and others at the fringes of society--each with their own impact on the fragile universe they navigate. At the story's center is Nina Gill, daughter of the aging owner of the Dallas Cowboys, who was instrumental in building her father's dynasty. So it's a shock when her brother inherits the team and she is left with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey's only Indoor Football League franchise. Nina vows to take on the NFL and make the Paterson Pork pigskin kings of America. Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles--a brilliant and lethal criminal mastermind--has gotten himself thrown into Rikers to commit perhaps the most audacious crime of all time. With grace, humor, and razor-sharp prose, De La Pava tackles everything from Salvador Dali, Joni Mitchell, psychiatric help, and emergency medicine to religion, the many species of love, and theoretical physics, as all these threads combine to count down to an epic conclusion.
From Paterson, New Jersey to Rikers Island to the streets of New York City, Sergio De La Pava's Lost Empress introduces readers to a cast of characters unlike any other in modern fiction: dreamers and exiles, immigrants and night-shift workers, lonely pastors and others at the fringes of society--each with their own impact on the fragile universe they navigate. At the story's center is Nina Gill, daughter of the aging owner of the Dallas Cowboys, who was instrumental in building her father's dynasty. So it's a shock when her brother inherits the team and she is left with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey's only Indoor Football League franchise. Nina vows to take on the NFL and make the Paterson Pork pigskin kings of America. Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles--a brilliant and lethal criminal mastermind--has gotten himself thrown into Rikers to commit perhaps the most audacious crime of all time. With grace, humor, and razor-sharp prose, De La Pava tackles everything from Salvador Dali, Joni Mitchell, psychiatric help, and emergency medicine to religion, the many species of love, and theoretical physics, as all these threads combine to count down to an epic conclusion.
629 pages, Hardcover
First published May 8, 2018
About the author
Sergio de la Pava
8 books240 followersSergio de la Pava is the author of A Naked Singularity.
Sergio de la Pava is a writer who does not live in Brooklyn.
In August, 2013, Sergio won PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for his debut fiction, A Naked Singularity.
Sergio de la Pava is a writer who does not live in Brooklyn.
In August, 2013, Sergio won PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for his debut fiction, A Naked Singularity.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews
December 16, 2018
Gazing Down the Plughole
It takes an exceptional talent to sustain comedic prose in so many distinct voices for over 600 pages. It also takes real dedication to persist in reading those 600 pages. The witty ripostes, the sarcastic asides, the pithy literary allusions by commercial geniuses, medicos with nous, and self-aware but larcenous offenders eventually are normalized so that the reader is thrown back to the story - which frankly ain’t that great.
A misogynistic cast of corporate types try to keep the sassy protagonist out of her family inheritance of managing an NFL football team. This is the central gyre into which everything else is eventually sucked. Meanwhile lots of NYC types, mostly felonious or incompetent, buzz around adding local colour and guided tours of cultural centres like Paterson, New Jersey and Rikers Island. It’s entertaining but is it art?
Of course it’s art. “Humanity’s best unnecessary invention is art.” And Lost Empress is entirely unnecessary. So I take it back. The story is irrelevant. What matters are the various stories that make up something different - not necessarily more than, just different - from the whole.
The book is a literary toy - with lots of moving parts. The whole doesn’t do anything productive. The point though is to watch the moving parts, which are fascinating. Each part spins or blinks or pulsates perfectly. That they engage with each other is incidental except that in total they form a ‘thing’.
The thing in question can be described as Sophisticated Street Trash. Urbanely clever in a detached sort of knowing, disregarding regard, the genre isn’t intended to evoke anything but the satisfaction of recognition. It’s a big inside joke shared round: Too bad, how sad, never mind. Nothing to see here but the usual absurdity. It’s a tough job but...
No, no, that’s not fair. From his perch above the fray, de la Pava has created a tribute to the dignity of human stupidity. Or is it the stupidity of human dignity? His book sends everything up - including itself - so perhaps it’s both. I love it.
It takes an exceptional talent to sustain comedic prose in so many distinct voices for over 600 pages. It also takes real dedication to persist in reading those 600 pages. The witty ripostes, the sarcastic asides, the pithy literary allusions by commercial geniuses, medicos with nous, and self-aware but larcenous offenders eventually are normalized so that the reader is thrown back to the story - which frankly ain’t that great.
A misogynistic cast of corporate types try to keep the sassy protagonist out of her family inheritance of managing an NFL football team. This is the central gyre into which everything else is eventually sucked. Meanwhile lots of NYC types, mostly felonious or incompetent, buzz around adding local colour and guided tours of cultural centres like Paterson, New Jersey and Rikers Island. It’s entertaining but is it art?
Of course it’s art. “Humanity’s best unnecessary invention is art.” And Lost Empress is entirely unnecessary. So I take it back. The story is irrelevant. What matters are the various stories that make up something different - not necessarily more than, just different - from the whole.
The book is a literary toy - with lots of moving parts. The whole doesn’t do anything productive. The point though is to watch the moving parts, which are fascinating. Each part spins or blinks or pulsates perfectly. That they engage with each other is incidental except that in total they form a ‘thing’.
The thing in question can be described as Sophisticated Street Trash. Urbanely clever in a detached sort of knowing, disregarding regard, the genre isn’t intended to evoke anything but the satisfaction of recognition. It’s a big inside joke shared round: Too bad, how sad, never mind. Nothing to see here but the usual absurdity. It’s a tough job but...
No, no, that’s not fair. From his perch above the fray, de la Pava has created a tribute to the dignity of human stupidity. Or is it the stupidity of human dignity? His book sends everything up - including itself - so perhaps it’s both. I love it.
March 14, 2023
Took me a MILLION YEARS to finish since it's way too long and way too smart for its own good, but the character of Nina Gill was worth every second.
Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.
Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.
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May 19, 2018Perhaps my first major novel=discovery credited to this wonderful corner of gr is A Naked Singularity. [the List in that exuberant Review of mine is now fully retired ; but I credit it with introducing me to a number of wonderful gr'r's]. I totally stuck by de la Pava when he pub'd his HatBox of a second novel. Certainly if anything can be experimental it's that one ; I doubt anyone's captured its unifying thread yet.
vs.
Danielewski's first one I had a mild reception to ; not quite hot enough after a steady diet of my favorite Barth. But really a cool novel. I bailed on his second one, Only Revolutions (but I will return!) and felt a bit cheated with his 50 Swords thing. But. Then. The Familiar. At least there's GOLD (once again) no one is buying now after five glorious volumes. [damn american readership with their crappy taste buds] At any rate. A story of my reading to contrast with mine of de la Pava....
Because his new one is not very good. It is written (I'll say 'edited' and blame the editor) for that readership I just growled at in the above para. Let me say it felt more like Pessl (or The Last Western but no one reads that one) than DFW. Of course it resembles DFW, like a dairy=queen strawberry milkshake resembles a strawberry and so can be appropriately thusly compared. There's very little fat in here ; some clever tricks ;; some of the DFW thought=swallowing=itself. There's characters and there's plot and. But. Just. Whatever. Disappointed.
vs.
Danielewski's first one I had a mild reception to ; not quite hot enough after a steady diet of my favorite Barth. But really a cool novel. I bailed on his second one, Only Revolutions (but I will return!) and felt a bit cheated with his 50 Swords thing. But. Then. The Familiar. At least there's GOLD (once again) no one is buying now after five glorious volumes. [damn american readership with their crappy taste buds] At any rate. A story of my reading to contrast with mine of de la Pava....
Because his new one is not very good. It is written (I'll say 'edited' and blame the editor) for that readership I just growled at in the above para. Let me say it felt more like Pessl (or The Last Western but no one reads that one) than DFW. Of course it resembles DFW, like a dairy=queen strawberry milkshake resembles a strawberry and so can be appropriately thusly compared. There's very little fat in here ; some clever tricks ;; some of the DFW thought=swallowing=itself. There's characters and there's plot and. But. Just. Whatever. Disappointed.
April 24, 2019
a naked singularity felt like a breath of fresh air to me, but i knew only 40 pages into this thing that it was a pale facsimile of the style/grace he achieved there with some sleeve-worn dfw influence thrown in. the witty dialogue is deeply unfunny, the cerebral riffs are weightless and performative. it's just not good. and i'm not reading 600-whatever pages of it.
December 26, 2025
The empty dark drives the savage truth straight into their vulnerable minds and the result is a kind of premature spiritual death.
There were wonderful sections of this novel and many which offered symbolic place holding but little else. I appreciate the author for vividly painting the eschatology of the underclass. The dialogue often dances almost like boxing. Descriptive passages tend to tunnel or lead directly rather than canvas.
This is a novel of both American football and that nation’s flawed system of justice. The former creates a ridiculous amount of money and a number of concussions, the latter creates a ridiculous amount of money via mass incarceration.
I liked the glosses on 911 call transcripts and the discography of Joni Mitchell. The subplot involving physics and entropy didn’t exactly coalesce lightly with the other themes. I’m thinking the author will eventually align the elements and give us a masterpiece. I’m a sucker for his self described samizdat-threnody.
There were wonderful sections of this novel and many which offered symbolic place holding but little else. I appreciate the author for vividly painting the eschatology of the underclass. The dialogue often dances almost like boxing. Descriptive passages tend to tunnel or lead directly rather than canvas.
This is a novel of both American football and that nation’s flawed system of justice. The former creates a ridiculous amount of money and a number of concussions, the latter creates a ridiculous amount of money via mass incarceration.
I liked the glosses on 911 call transcripts and the discography of Joni Mitchell. The subplot involving physics and entropy didn’t exactly coalesce lightly with the other themes. I’m thinking the author will eventually align the elements and give us a masterpiece. I’m a sucker for his self described samizdat-threnody.
March 28, 2023
Sergio de la Pava is like that band you discovered when you were a teenager. You know the one I'm talking about. Not many people knew about them but a friend caught them randomly at some basement show and told you about their self-produced, low-budget debut album and listening to it changed your life. You listened to it over and over, obsessing over the lyrics and instrumentation, subconsciously connecting to it on an even more personal level because none of your friends had really heard it yet, and it felt like that band was YOURS, you know?
And then slowly, the word started to get out. Publications starting giving their album glowing reviews. The concerts got bigger. People from a different clique that you didn't really like saw you wearing their t-shirt and said, "that's my favorite band too!" Even though you knew none of this really mattered when it came down to your connection with the music, something felt different.
Another album came out, still self-produced but a little more confident, and you loved that too, and it gave you weird satisfaction that it didn't really make that big of a splash on the national scene. It still felt like the band was in your sphere of existence, and for some reason, that was important. You were now okay with some people knowing about them -- it was nice to have people to talk to about the things that made them so great.
But then suddenly the band signed to a major label. Everyone was not only talking about their upcoming major label debut release but going back and discovering the older albums that you cherished so much. You were still excited about the new music, but suddenly there was the weight of a different kind of expectation; a heightened anxiety about what the band would produce under the pressure of a larger, more mainstream audience.
The album finally comes out. You start to listen and it's immediately apparent that something has changed. The presentation is more polished, but it seems....different. Hollow, almost. The same general style is present, but it feels like it's the band trying to imitate themselves. The lyrics, which you've always regarded as deep and meaningful, seem overly simplistic. Some parts are not very clever -- even approaching what you would consider bad -- something you never would've said about them before.
As you're getting towards the end of the record, you haven't been wow-ed by a single song. You start to recognize parts of what made you fall in love with the band in some songs towards the end, but those notes aren't sustained, and are too commonly interrupted by this new, unimpressive tone. When you're finished, you can only confirm the feeling you were all too afraid of encountering.
Disappointment.
You'll still support the band, of course. You'll check out whatever they do next, but your expectations are forever set at a lower level from now on. You find yourself going back to listen to their first two albums, even saying that classic line when the band comes up in conversation: they're good but their old stuff was better.
And then slowly, the word started to get out. Publications starting giving their album glowing reviews. The concerts got bigger. People from a different clique that you didn't really like saw you wearing their t-shirt and said, "that's my favorite band too!" Even though you knew none of this really mattered when it came down to your connection with the music, something felt different.
Another album came out, still self-produced but a little more confident, and you loved that too, and it gave you weird satisfaction that it didn't really make that big of a splash on the national scene. It still felt like the band was in your sphere of existence, and for some reason, that was important. You were now okay with some people knowing about them -- it was nice to have people to talk to about the things that made them so great.
But then suddenly the band signed to a major label. Everyone was not only talking about their upcoming major label debut release but going back and discovering the older albums that you cherished so much. You were still excited about the new music, but suddenly there was the weight of a different kind of expectation; a heightened anxiety about what the band would produce under the pressure of a larger, more mainstream audience.
The album finally comes out. You start to listen and it's immediately apparent that something has changed. The presentation is more polished, but it seems....different. Hollow, almost. The same general style is present, but it feels like it's the band trying to imitate themselves. The lyrics, which you've always regarded as deep and meaningful, seem overly simplistic. Some parts are not very clever -- even approaching what you would consider bad -- something you never would've said about them before.
As you're getting towards the end of the record, you haven't been wow-ed by a single song. You start to recognize parts of what made you fall in love with the band in some songs towards the end, but those notes aren't sustained, and are too commonly interrupted by this new, unimpressive tone. When you're finished, you can only confirm the feeling you were all too afraid of encountering.
Disappointment.
You'll still support the band, of course. You'll check out whatever they do next, but your expectations are forever set at a lower level from now on. You find yourself going back to listen to their first two albums, even saying that classic line when the band comes up in conversation: they're good but their old stuff was better.
June 12, 2018
If Thomas Pynchon, now 81, never pens another novel I’ll be sad, grateful for his epic novels like GRAVITY’S RAINBOW and AGAINST THE DAY, but content we still have Sergio de la Pava hanging around writing novels like A NAKED SINGULARITY and his latest LOST EMPRESS. While he’s no Pynchon, who is? de la Pava is certainly standing precariously on Pynchon’s shoulders. De la Pava is of the same, to put a label on it, Postmodernist tribe as Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, Wallace, Murakami, and Bolaño. World-builders, builders of alternate realities, of door-stopper-mega-novels embracing everything that is or could be.
When the NFL owners lock out the players over revenue-sharing dispute, Nina Gill, the rebellious and brilliant daughter of Cowboys owner Worthington Gill, and commissioner of the Indoor Football League (IFL) sees an opportunity to break the dominance of the major league (and sticking it to her family) by rescheduling the IFL season, now the only game in town, to coincide with the traditional Fall football season. Oh, yeah, she also happens to be owner of the IFL's Paterson Pork, of Paterson, New Jersey.
This is the initial set up for LOST EMPRESS. However, believe me, if this were merely another sports novel, I wouldn't be writing this. I'm not fond of that cliche-ridden genré. De la Pava uses football the way DeLillo uses baseball in his wonderful novel UNDERWORLD, as a metaphor for elements in the greater American culture, greed, violence, exploitation, economic insanity. It's about emergency medicine, the American criminal justice system, philosophy, physics.
LOST EMPRESS is about coincidences, unseen networks. It's a massively complex web of characters somehow all connected in one way or another. Nuno DeAngeles in Rikers plotting his biggest score. Jorge de Cervantes, impaled while waiting at a bus stop, and Larry Brown the EMT who responds. Sharon Seaborg, 911 operator and ex of Riker guard Hugh Seaborg. Travis Mena MD, and soon to be Paterson Pig mascot. There's a missing Dali, pugilistic contests between franchise mascots to determine ball possession (the Paterson Pig versus the Maryland Crab), the CERN collider and theoretical physics, Joni Mitchell albums, alternate timelines, links to the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. There are 911 call transcripts, court transcripts, an inmate rulebook for New York City Department of Corrections, even a full Motion to Dismiss document -- de la Pava uses many voices to tell the story.
It's fun to read, and seeing how de la Pava effortlessly weaves all these characters and topics together is entertaining in itself. I look forward to Sergio de la Pava's next novel.
When the NFL owners lock out the players over revenue-sharing dispute, Nina Gill, the rebellious and brilliant daughter of Cowboys owner Worthington Gill, and commissioner of the Indoor Football League (IFL) sees an opportunity to break the dominance of the major league (and sticking it to her family) by rescheduling the IFL season, now the only game in town, to coincide with the traditional Fall football season. Oh, yeah, she also happens to be owner of the IFL's Paterson Pork, of Paterson, New Jersey.
This is the initial set up for LOST EMPRESS. However, believe me, if this were merely another sports novel, I wouldn't be writing this. I'm not fond of that cliche-ridden genré. De la Pava uses football the way DeLillo uses baseball in his wonderful novel UNDERWORLD, as a metaphor for elements in the greater American culture, greed, violence, exploitation, economic insanity. It's about emergency medicine, the American criminal justice system, philosophy, physics.
LOST EMPRESS is about coincidences, unseen networks. It's a massively complex web of characters somehow all connected in one way or another. Nuno DeAngeles in Rikers plotting his biggest score. Jorge de Cervantes, impaled while waiting at a bus stop, and Larry Brown the EMT who responds. Sharon Seaborg, 911 operator and ex of Riker guard Hugh Seaborg. Travis Mena MD, and soon to be Paterson Pig mascot. There's a missing Dali, pugilistic contests between franchise mascots to determine ball possession (the Paterson Pig versus the Maryland Crab), the CERN collider and theoretical physics, Joni Mitchell albums, alternate timelines, links to the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. There are 911 call transcripts, court transcripts, an inmate rulebook for New York City Department of Corrections, even a full Motion to Dismiss document -- de la Pava uses many voices to tell the story.
It's fun to read, and seeing how de la Pava effortlessly weaves all these characters and topics together is entertaining in itself. I look forward to Sergio de la Pava's next novel.
May 24, 2023
I'm an admirer of Mr de la Pava's work. I love the intense intelligence hooked up with a great sense of humour.
This novel has 2 parallel plot lines that converge (I wasn't always convinced that they would) to a slightly unsatisfactory conclusion. But the journey to get there was fun and that's the main thing for me
This novel has 2 parallel plot lines that converge (I wasn't always convinced that they would) to a slightly unsatisfactory conclusion. But the journey to get there was fun and that's the main thing for me
August 26, 2018
(repeat my usual plaint re the flaws of simple five-star rating )
(specifically, i would break this out into sub-ratings, and i would give this book a five for ambition, a four for creativity, a two for execution, and .5 stars for authorial restraint)
i have long been out of the custom of reading maximal literary novels but i enjoyed Naked Singularity (which has a loooot of the same charms and anti-charms as this book) and generally dig de la Pava's authorial persona (he self-published Naked S. after getting rejected by a lot of agents) and also I had a coupon on the kindle store
so this is a novel about a parallel universe where the NFL goes on strike and an XFL-esque subaltern league rises to prominence thanks to the expertise of renegade NFL heiress who is basically a 1930s screwball heroine (Nina). meanwhile, on Rikers Island, a character who is clearly meant as a kind of non-biological twin (Nuno) gets himself sent to Rikers on purpose in order to steal already-stolen art hidden there. These two stories creep toward one another with a bunch of detours and weirdnesses.
at its core (and you have to do a lot of chewing to get to that core) this is a novel about 1) the carceral state 2) football 3) the moloch blood-god-esque shared properties of items 1 & 2. it is at times impossibly funny, punishingly accurate in its tossed-off diagonses of social and spiritual woes of 21c america/humankind in general. it is also a giant sloppy mess, with huge skippable monologues about space time, too much philosophizng, and savagely undercooked plot mechanics . it just doesn't really feel 100% finished, which who knows, is a book ever finished.
i think there is a killer 200 page novel in here about football, prison, and the shape of souls and i enjoyed reading those passages immensely. i feel less positive about the other parts of the book but if i have to choose between deranged haymakers like this and dehydrated, narrow introspection, i will choose this book every time because it has jokes. (no one is making me choose, but i am choosing to choose as a kind of ambient, unsolicited hostile gesture)
(specifically, i would break this out into sub-ratings, and i would give this book a five for ambition, a four for creativity, a two for execution, and .5 stars for authorial restraint)
i have long been out of the custom of reading maximal literary novels but i enjoyed Naked Singularity (which has a loooot of the same charms and anti-charms as this book) and generally dig de la Pava's authorial persona (he self-published Naked S. after getting rejected by a lot of agents) and also I had a coupon on the kindle store
so this is a novel about a parallel universe where the NFL goes on strike and an XFL-esque subaltern league rises to prominence thanks to the expertise of renegade NFL heiress who is basically a 1930s screwball heroine (Nina). meanwhile, on Rikers Island, a character who is clearly meant as a kind of non-biological twin (Nuno) gets himself sent to Rikers on purpose in order to steal already-stolen art hidden there. These two stories creep toward one another with a bunch of detours and weirdnesses.
at its core (and you have to do a lot of chewing to get to that core) this is a novel about 1) the carceral state 2) football 3) the moloch blood-god-esque shared properties of items 1 & 2. it is at times impossibly funny, punishingly accurate in its tossed-off diagonses of social and spiritual woes of 21c america/humankind in general. it is also a giant sloppy mess, with huge skippable monologues about space time, too much philosophizng, and savagely undercooked plot mechanics . it just doesn't really feel 100% finished, which who knows, is a book ever finished.
i think there is a killer 200 page novel in here about football, prison, and the shape of souls and i enjoyed reading those passages immensely. i feel less positive about the other parts of the book but if i have to choose between deranged haymakers like this and dehydrated, narrow introspection, i will choose this book every time because it has jokes. (no one is making me choose, but i am choosing to choose as a kind of ambient, unsolicited hostile gesture)
March 10, 2019
If you look out over the landscape and all you see is post-Carver MFA stuff, “how I came of age in small-town Indiana,” Sergio de la Pava is the writer for you. Now, as someone who got serious about his own writing due to post/meta/modern fiction, you might say Sergio de la Pava is the writer for me as well. And hey, I do enjoy A Naked Singularity a great deal. However, if there’s one thing we all should learn from Lost Empress, de la Pava’s third novel and second doorstopper, it’s that those small-town Indiana novels have a lot to teach us, too.
This book has a whole host of problems, problems that on the surface don’t seem too dissimilar from A Naked Singularity’s problems. Well, really, I consider Singularity’s shortcomings more quirks than anything else. Features, not bugs. Singularity hews so close to David Foster Wallace’s super-smart, over-caffeinated prose style it’s downright shocking, it sometimes feels more like de la Pava is brushing up for his PhD dissertation than writing a novel, its characters sometimes come off as caricatures, and there are moments where de la Pava dives so far deep down the rabbit hole that not even the most intrepid bunnies will follow. I’m still a fan of that book, though, because it has a real sense of center. Throughout the whole book, I feel how exhausted Casi the skilled-but-overworked public defender is. So I was perfectly happy to indulge de la Pava his tangents. I knew he’d bring it back to Casi, who by the way is quite the memorable character. In the meantime, I was happy to watch de la Pava’s brain work. He’s a smart guy, after all, and sometimes it’s fun to just kinda listen to smart, funny people talk.
Well, de la Pava’s still pretty smart, so if you’re worried he lost his signature sharpness by, I don’t know, huffing airplane glue or whatever, no worries there. He’s also pretty funny, although I find the humor a lot more broad here, where the humor in Singularity came from his attention to his characters’ quirks. What we lose, and what his previous tome did so well, is the human factor. Other than the bits where Dia (more on her when we get into the plot) raves about Joni Mitchell, I don’t think anyone in this book expresses a recognizable human emotion, and we all know the Joni Mitchell bits are really de la Pava raving about Joni Mitchell. Incidentally, he reveals himself here to have broader musical tastes than the butt-metal he references all over Singularity... I’d much rather hear a character hold forth about Joni Mitchell than Yngwie Malmsteen, although both Pantera and Satriani rear their musically uninteresting heads here. Pantera aside (and I mean as far aside as we can put them), it seems as though every character exists as a different embodiment of the various systems de la Pava wants to tell us about here. Which isn’t exactly the path toward compelling fiction.
A word on the plot. Lost Empress weaves two strands together. One concerns Nuno, the whip-smart Rikers Island inmate, attempting to do about fifty novels’ worth of stuff while he’s in there. He’s there to steal a piece of art and avenge his uncle’s death and rail against the injustice of the system (and the penal system really is unjust… de la Pava’s a public defender, he ought to know. I’m also in writing group with a public defender. I wonder if he’s read de la Pava) and debate theology and argue with the court about the Khmer Rogue and, in what clearly has to be one of the great “you’re fucking with me, aren’t you” moments in 21st century literature, take classes with a quantum physicist who may or may not be from a mysteeeeeeeeerious alternate dimension where the New England Patriots have won a ton of fucking Super Bowls. Nuno, in case you haven’t noticed, is kind of whatever de la Pava needs him to be. De la Pava doesn’t seem comfortable letting him stand up and walk around and inhabit his own world, the way he did with Casi. No, if de la Pava has a point to prove, Nuno is his mouthpiece. The closest we get to true humanity from him is his deep abiding love of Dia (again, we’ll get to Dia), but even then, I hear a lot about their love but I don’t really feel it.
The Nuno bits are intermittently gripping and sometimes quite funny, and they do give me a lot to think about, but as a fictional character, he doesn’t work. I mean, he talks like he’s defending his PhD thesis in every single situation he’s in, and he can talk about basically any topic, at great length, often shutting down so-called experts. Don’t get me wrong, I have no reason to doubt that a lot of highly intelligent people end up incarcerated, but there’s a difference between putting a highly intelligent character in prison (see Rachel Kushner’s far better Mars Room for that) and putting a mouthpiece for a highly intelligent author in prison. The de la Pava of Lost Empress reminds me of Nicholas Mosley and Martin Amis and Ben Marcus and my one coworker who got fired, in that he’s the smartest guy in the room, and everyone recognizes this, and yet he still won’t rest until he’s demonstrated the fullest extent of his intelligence. Like, he’ll happily pour you a cup of coffee, but get ready for a six-hour lecture on where the coffee beans grew and the differences between each variety of bean and French press vs. espresso vs. cold brew vs. drip. Reader, it isn’t lost on me that David Foster Wallace’s weakest material often falls into this same trap.
The second strand concerns one Nina, who I suppose is our “lost empress.” Her brother manages the Dallas Cowboys, who in this universe are a football powerhouse comparable to, well, the Patriots. As a result of an NFL lockout, Nina takes ownership of the minor-league football team Patterson Pork, and moves their schedule into the fall, to fill the football void. Apparently Trump tried a similar trick with a minor football league in the ‘80s, and apparently he ran them into the ground, because I guess when you’re rich you can just break stuff (a football league, a casino, an entire country’s notion of truth) and get away with it. I’m not sure whether there were supposed to be parallels, especially since Nina verbally barbecues a Trump stand-in around page 500. She’s joined on her quest by one Dia, who I guess sort of has a character arc, in that she gets better at her job as time goes on. And also talks a lot about Joni Mitchell. Dia and Nuno were an item once upon a time, before Nuno ended up in Rikers. Hence, Nuno’s deep abiding love for her.
I’m going to hone in on the Joni Mitchell stuff, because de la Pava pulled a similar trick on A Naked Singularity, and it ended up being one of my favorite things about the book. Whole chapters of Singularity track the boxing career of Wilfred Benitez, and at first I wondered where the hell he was going with it. It didn’t take me long to work out that he was using Benitez as a parallel for Casi’s career, and well, I loved that. The Benitez plot sheds light on the Casi plot, and it’s also beautifully written. Some of the best prose in that book is in the Benitez bits. Some of the best prose in this book is in the Joni Mitchell bits, and as a Joni Mitchell fan (and a fan of writing about music in general), I was certainly into them on face value. But at the same point, I’m not sure what point de la Pava was trying to make here. Who does this shed light on? I’m sure it’s supposed to shed light on Dia, but we just learn so frustratingly little about her that it doesn’t ring true. It reads like de la Pava got on a roll with the first nine Joni Mitchell albums and just decided to dump his thoughts out on the page, because hey, he dumped out his thoughts about everything else.
Look, I know some fans of this book might jump on me for all the Naked Singularity comparisons, but de la Pava is so clearly trying to go back to that well here. Except I would wager he’s forgotten the big thing that worked about Singularity, which was Casi. We never see behind anyone’s facades here. Nuno is always righteously pissed off and about six or seven steps ahead of all these other idiots… even his one big moment of vulnerability, the moment where I thought this book would finally break into real human territory, is all part of the plan, don’t ya know. Nina is always steely-eyed and condescending and determined to get ahead at the expense of everyone else. Dia, well, I spent six hundred pages with Dia and I’m not sure what she is. Good at her job? A fan of both metal and Joni Mitchell? Come on, I need more than this.
So you might wonder why I saw this book through. Well, I have to admit, I was curious where de la Pava was going with this. If you’ve read Singularity, you know that it ends with a kick-ass heist scene and its aftermath. After a certain point, I just wanted to know if I was going to get a big set piece for my troubles. And I did, the juxtaposition of a football game (Pork vs. Cowboys, and I mean that isn’t even a spoiler, if you didn’t see that coming you’d best get your eyes checked) with an art heist. It’s grippingly written, no doubt about it, but even then it doesn’t go as deep as the end of Singularity. That ending worked both because it was so fascinating to follow and because it was the logical endpoint to Casi’s strange arc. It has resonances this one doesn’t. Which is the problem of the whole book. Lost Empress sketches out some of the systems that drive our life. All fine and good, but A Naked Singularity shows us what it’s like to live under those systems. And that, my friends, is what separates the best novels from the rest of ‘em.
This book has a whole host of problems, problems that on the surface don’t seem too dissimilar from A Naked Singularity’s problems. Well, really, I consider Singularity’s shortcomings more quirks than anything else. Features, not bugs. Singularity hews so close to David Foster Wallace’s super-smart, over-caffeinated prose style it’s downright shocking, it sometimes feels more like de la Pava is brushing up for his PhD dissertation than writing a novel, its characters sometimes come off as caricatures, and there are moments where de la Pava dives so far deep down the rabbit hole that not even the most intrepid bunnies will follow. I’m still a fan of that book, though, because it has a real sense of center. Throughout the whole book, I feel how exhausted Casi the skilled-but-overworked public defender is. So I was perfectly happy to indulge de la Pava his tangents. I knew he’d bring it back to Casi, who by the way is quite the memorable character. In the meantime, I was happy to watch de la Pava’s brain work. He’s a smart guy, after all, and sometimes it’s fun to just kinda listen to smart, funny people talk.
Well, de la Pava’s still pretty smart, so if you’re worried he lost his signature sharpness by, I don’t know, huffing airplane glue or whatever, no worries there. He’s also pretty funny, although I find the humor a lot more broad here, where the humor in Singularity came from his attention to his characters’ quirks. What we lose, and what his previous tome did so well, is the human factor. Other than the bits where Dia (more on her when we get into the plot) raves about Joni Mitchell, I don’t think anyone in this book expresses a recognizable human emotion, and we all know the Joni Mitchell bits are really de la Pava raving about Joni Mitchell. Incidentally, he reveals himself here to have broader musical tastes than the butt-metal he references all over Singularity... I’d much rather hear a character hold forth about Joni Mitchell than Yngwie Malmsteen, although both Pantera and Satriani rear their musically uninteresting heads here. Pantera aside (and I mean as far aside as we can put them), it seems as though every character exists as a different embodiment of the various systems de la Pava wants to tell us about here. Which isn’t exactly the path toward compelling fiction.
A word on the plot. Lost Empress weaves two strands together. One concerns Nuno, the whip-smart Rikers Island inmate, attempting to do about fifty novels’ worth of stuff while he’s in there. He’s there to steal a piece of art and avenge his uncle’s death and rail against the injustice of the system (and the penal system really is unjust… de la Pava’s a public defender, he ought to know. I’m also in writing group with a public defender. I wonder if he’s read de la Pava) and debate theology and argue with the court about the Khmer Rogue and, in what clearly has to be one of the great “you’re fucking with me, aren’t you” moments in 21st century literature, take classes with a quantum physicist who may or may not be from a mysteeeeeeeeerious alternate dimension where the New England Patriots have won a ton of fucking Super Bowls. Nuno, in case you haven’t noticed, is kind of whatever de la Pava needs him to be. De la Pava doesn’t seem comfortable letting him stand up and walk around and inhabit his own world, the way he did with Casi. No, if de la Pava has a point to prove, Nuno is his mouthpiece. The closest we get to true humanity from him is his deep abiding love of Dia (again, we’ll get to Dia), but even then, I hear a lot about their love but I don’t really feel it.
The Nuno bits are intermittently gripping and sometimes quite funny, and they do give me a lot to think about, but as a fictional character, he doesn’t work. I mean, he talks like he’s defending his PhD thesis in every single situation he’s in, and he can talk about basically any topic, at great length, often shutting down so-called experts. Don’t get me wrong, I have no reason to doubt that a lot of highly intelligent people end up incarcerated, but there’s a difference between putting a highly intelligent character in prison (see Rachel Kushner’s far better Mars Room for that) and putting a mouthpiece for a highly intelligent author in prison. The de la Pava of Lost Empress reminds me of Nicholas Mosley and Martin Amis and Ben Marcus and my one coworker who got fired, in that he’s the smartest guy in the room, and everyone recognizes this, and yet he still won’t rest until he’s demonstrated the fullest extent of his intelligence. Like, he’ll happily pour you a cup of coffee, but get ready for a six-hour lecture on where the coffee beans grew and the differences between each variety of bean and French press vs. espresso vs. cold brew vs. drip. Reader, it isn’t lost on me that David Foster Wallace’s weakest material often falls into this same trap.
The second strand concerns one Nina, who I suppose is our “lost empress.” Her brother manages the Dallas Cowboys, who in this universe are a football powerhouse comparable to, well, the Patriots. As a result of an NFL lockout, Nina takes ownership of the minor-league football team Patterson Pork, and moves their schedule into the fall, to fill the football void. Apparently Trump tried a similar trick with a minor football league in the ‘80s, and apparently he ran them into the ground, because I guess when you’re rich you can just break stuff (a football league, a casino, an entire country’s notion of truth) and get away with it. I’m not sure whether there were supposed to be parallels, especially since Nina verbally barbecues a Trump stand-in around page 500. She’s joined on her quest by one Dia, who I guess sort of has a character arc, in that she gets better at her job as time goes on. And also talks a lot about Joni Mitchell. Dia and Nuno were an item once upon a time, before Nuno ended up in Rikers. Hence, Nuno’s deep abiding love for her.
I’m going to hone in on the Joni Mitchell stuff, because de la Pava pulled a similar trick on A Naked Singularity, and it ended up being one of my favorite things about the book. Whole chapters of Singularity track the boxing career of Wilfred Benitez, and at first I wondered where the hell he was going with it. It didn’t take me long to work out that he was using Benitez as a parallel for Casi’s career, and well, I loved that. The Benitez plot sheds light on the Casi plot, and it’s also beautifully written. Some of the best prose in that book is in the Benitez bits. Some of the best prose in this book is in the Joni Mitchell bits, and as a Joni Mitchell fan (and a fan of writing about music in general), I was certainly into them on face value. But at the same point, I’m not sure what point de la Pava was trying to make here. Who does this shed light on? I’m sure it’s supposed to shed light on Dia, but we just learn so frustratingly little about her that it doesn’t ring true. It reads like de la Pava got on a roll with the first nine Joni Mitchell albums and just decided to dump his thoughts out on the page, because hey, he dumped out his thoughts about everything else.
Look, I know some fans of this book might jump on me for all the Naked Singularity comparisons, but de la Pava is so clearly trying to go back to that well here. Except I would wager he’s forgotten the big thing that worked about Singularity, which was Casi. We never see behind anyone’s facades here. Nuno is always righteously pissed off and about six or seven steps ahead of all these other idiots… even his one big moment of vulnerability, the moment where I thought this book would finally break into real human territory, is all part of the plan, don’t ya know. Nina is always steely-eyed and condescending and determined to get ahead at the expense of everyone else. Dia, well, I spent six hundred pages with Dia and I’m not sure what she is. Good at her job? A fan of both metal and Joni Mitchell? Come on, I need more than this.
So you might wonder why I saw this book through. Well, I have to admit, I was curious where de la Pava was going with this. If you’ve read Singularity, you know that it ends with a kick-ass heist scene and its aftermath. After a certain point, I just wanted to know if I was going to get a big set piece for my troubles. And I did, the juxtaposition of a football game (Pork vs. Cowboys, and I mean that isn’t even a spoiler, if you didn’t see that coming you’d best get your eyes checked) with an art heist. It’s grippingly written, no doubt about it, but even then it doesn’t go as deep as the end of Singularity. That ending worked both because it was so fascinating to follow and because it was the logical endpoint to Casi’s strange arc. It has resonances this one doesn’t. Which is the problem of the whole book. Lost Empress sketches out some of the systems that drive our life. All fine and good, but A Naked Singularity shows us what it’s like to live under those systems. And that, my friends, is what separates the best novels from the rest of ‘em.
October 17, 2023
Tough to be better than A Naked Singularity. Underrated book. Great football scenes.
4.5 ⭐️
4.5 ⭐️
July 27, 2018
A brilliant, funny, crude, violent, wildly inventive ensemble novel featuring an oligarch NFL owner, a Rikers inmate, a 911 dispatcher, an EMT, art thieves, a genius parking-garage attendant, and--my favorite character--a sandwich deliverywoman turned fake lawyer turned into deputy commissioner of a semi-pro football league. This massive story is impossible to summarize. It's also the best case I've read in ages for the continuing social relevance of the novel.
"A man who doesn't read novels can never be a real man."
"A man who doesn't read novels can never be a real man."
August 18, 2018
Sergio de la Pava overplays his hand.
It seems to me that Sergio de la Pava’s extraordinary novel, A Naked Singularity, was just that – a singularity. Here, with Lost Empress, I’m sure he set out with the best intentions to create something even more spectacular. But instead he ends up, in my view, with a misjudged and highly self-indulgent melee.
On the plus side, Lost Empress has some inventive characters, most notably Nina Gill, the striking-looking, shoot-from-the-ample-hip, win-at-all-costs heroine and the book is certainly a duller place when she’s not on the page. Nina has lost out to her brother Daniel in the inheritance stakes, he gaining ownership of their father’s NFL team, the Dallas Cowboys, she being left with the Indoor Football League’s booby-prize, Paterson Pork. Can she put the nondescript town of Paterson on the map?
There are also plenty of other elements that could potentially have held the reader’s interest. Unfortunately, de la Pava wrings the life out of them, indulging in endless rambling about astrophysics, the parables of the New Testament, the frustration of dealing with first response 911 calls, the injustice of incarceration, Salvador Dalí, Joni Mitchell and the esoterica of American football. (Well, I suppose this last is to be expected given the plot. There is a rundown of the rules at the end of the book.)
I found myself skipping more and more of Lost Empress until towards the end when de la Pava returns to the main thrust of his narrative and starts to pull the threads together. Occasionally, we catch a brief (I use the term loosely; de la Pava does not do brief) glimpse of the man who wrote A Naked Singularity. It’s not that we want our favoured authors to keep repeating that which we loved – but on the other hand, we don’t want them to bore us into skipping vast chunks, do we?
This quote seems apt: "...we see Jesus as a kind of free literary artist constantly presenting and shaping his truth through stories, metaphor, symbolism. I'm reminded of my high school English class and a time when we spent about a week analysing a poem, don't quite remember which one. Finally, on Friday one of my classmates raised his hand and since it was the only hand up the teacher kind of reluctantly pointed at it. 'If that's what he wanted to say all along,' this student complained, 'why couldn't he have just come right out with it and saved us a week?' And everybody laughed, of course, primarily because it was true in some sense."
Well, quite.
My thanks to MacLehose Press for the review copy courtesy of NetGalley.
It seems to me that Sergio de la Pava’s extraordinary novel, A Naked Singularity, was just that – a singularity. Here, with Lost Empress, I’m sure he set out with the best intentions to create something even more spectacular. But instead he ends up, in my view, with a misjudged and highly self-indulgent melee.
On the plus side, Lost Empress has some inventive characters, most notably Nina Gill, the striking-looking, shoot-from-the-ample-hip, win-at-all-costs heroine and the book is certainly a duller place when she’s not on the page. Nina has lost out to her brother Daniel in the inheritance stakes, he gaining ownership of their father’s NFL team, the Dallas Cowboys, she being left with the Indoor Football League’s booby-prize, Paterson Pork. Can she put the nondescript town of Paterson on the map?
There are also plenty of other elements that could potentially have held the reader’s interest. Unfortunately, de la Pava wrings the life out of them, indulging in endless rambling about astrophysics, the parables of the New Testament, the frustration of dealing with first response 911 calls, the injustice of incarceration, Salvador Dalí, Joni Mitchell and the esoterica of American football. (Well, I suppose this last is to be expected given the plot. There is a rundown of the rules at the end of the book.)
I found myself skipping more and more of Lost Empress until towards the end when de la Pava returns to the main thrust of his narrative and starts to pull the threads together. Occasionally, we catch a brief (I use the term loosely; de la Pava does not do brief) glimpse of the man who wrote A Naked Singularity. It’s not that we want our favoured authors to keep repeating that which we loved – but on the other hand, we don’t want them to bore us into skipping vast chunks, do we?
This quote seems apt: "...we see Jesus as a kind of free literary artist constantly presenting and shaping his truth through stories, metaphor, symbolism. I'm reminded of my high school English class and a time when we spent about a week analysing a poem, don't quite remember which one. Finally, on Friday one of my classmates raised his hand and since it was the only hand up the teacher kind of reluctantly pointed at it. 'If that's what he wanted to say all along,' this student complained, 'why couldn't he have just come right out with it and saved us a week?' And everybody laughed, of course, primarily because it was true in some sense."
Well, quite.
My thanks to MacLehose Press for the review copy courtesy of NetGalley.
June 15, 2018
Loved it. It's weird, sprawling, hilarious, moving and sometimes thrilling, especially in the final chapters. It's a big rush of a book that mash-ups metaphysics, deep musings about time and past, present and future, Joni Mitchell obsession, Salvador Dali, the American justice system, rich and poor, death, prison escapes, and football -- both NFL and the indoor kind. Huge cast of memorable characters and instantly re-read worthy dialogue. It's like a Robert Altman movie with a script co-written by Kurt Vonnegut.
June 27, 2018
Frustrating book. The winding of characters and even the bones of the story are good, but too many sitcom dialogues, lectures, and eye-rolling shortcuts on development of story and of character. Audible book performances were pretty good but I’m too lazy to enter that edition in here myself.
December 9, 2018
There's so much to enjoy about this, but it overwhelms itself with too much lecturing (on time, physics, justice both mortal & cosmic) and an increasingly trippy/surreal climax which seems to offer different realities from our own but just up being errant nonsense.
Far be it for me to offer advice to a writer & his editor, but this should have been half the pages it was in order to become twice the book. He creates a fantastic lead female character Nina Gill who destroys everyone who comes up against her and channels both Groucho Marx with Mae West in her indomitable spirit and anarchic humour. her sidekick Dia is pretty good too as she falls in love with the music stylings of Joni Mitchell introduced to her by her boss. And if we'd stuck with this duo in their campaign to fill the void of the NFL suffering from a players' lock out by the team owners as they argue over the division of the multi-millions dollar pie, with a second rate indoor league, that would have done for me. Echoes of Roth's "The Great American Novel" (which I happened also to have read this year), which does for baseball what this book does for gridiron. But it doesn't, there's a character who is a graduate genius psychopath who opts to defend himself against a murder charge - so on about page 560, we get introduced to the issue of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia which has never been mentioned before. I couldn't really follow the mental turns of this man's psyche at all and he's the one who tries to take us with him on his philosophical quests for alternate realities. Again, if we'd stuck to him & Nina Gill, we'd still have a pretty damn fine novel. But there's a further cast of minor characters who fade from the novel by about halfway and who therefore I didn't really see what their point was at all. Now while I was royally entertained by the Lecturer at Bellevue Mental hospital, who seemed more of a delusional inmate than a visiting academic, and he had many interesting theories on time and reality & death, but he was essentially a mouthpiece for the author to lecture us on these ideas, just as much as the psycho was a mouthpiece for the author's day job as a Public defender to lecture us on criminal justice.
Brilliant and aggravating by equal turns.
Included in video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l31F...
Far be it for me to offer advice to a writer & his editor, but this should have been half the pages it was in order to become twice the book. He creates a fantastic lead female character Nina Gill who destroys everyone who comes up against her and channels both Groucho Marx with Mae West in her indomitable spirit and anarchic humour. her sidekick Dia is pretty good too as she falls in love with the music stylings of Joni Mitchell introduced to her by her boss. And if we'd stuck with this duo in their campaign to fill the void of the NFL suffering from a players' lock out by the team owners as they argue over the division of the multi-millions dollar pie, with a second rate indoor league, that would have done for me. Echoes of Roth's "The Great American Novel" (which I happened also to have read this year), which does for baseball what this book does for gridiron. But it doesn't, there's a character who is a graduate genius psychopath who opts to defend himself against a murder charge - so on about page 560, we get introduced to the issue of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia which has never been mentioned before. I couldn't really follow the mental turns of this man's psyche at all and he's the one who tries to take us with him on his philosophical quests for alternate realities. Again, if we'd stuck to him & Nina Gill, we'd still have a pretty damn fine novel. But there's a further cast of minor characters who fade from the novel by about halfway and who therefore I didn't really see what their point was at all. Now while I was royally entertained by the Lecturer at Bellevue Mental hospital, who seemed more of a delusional inmate than a visiting academic, and he had many interesting theories on time and reality & death, but he was essentially a mouthpiece for the author to lecture us on these ideas, just as much as the psycho was a mouthpiece for the author's day job as a Public defender to lecture us on criminal justice.
Brilliant and aggravating by equal turns.
Included in video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l31F...
June 27, 2018
Pava likes to deal in the absurd, and it works well for "Lost Empress." This is a novel that focuses on the underclass with a close examination of the justice system. The actual story line is entertaining and there is an abundance of memorable characters, but what makes this novel stand out are the long extrapolations that seem to spring out of nowhere in almost every chapter. A lot of readers will find these tangents too tedious, but it provides the meat of the novel and elevates it to a more ambitious project that is worthy of our appreciation.
The witticisms are a little overdone at times (particularly the Nina Gill chapters) and this novel is far from perfect, but it is entertaining, cleverly written and it highlights life's incomprehensible nature. That's more than can be said for a lot of novels being written these days. I found it to be an excellent read.
The witticisms are a little overdone at times (particularly the Nina Gill chapters) and this novel is far from perfect, but it is entertaining, cleverly written and it highlights life's incomprehensible nature. That's more than can be said for a lot of novels being written these days. I found it to be an excellent read.
June 9, 2018
This is just a ridiculously ambitious book that tackles just about every topic, from the horror of the NFL to the cruelties of our justice system. Though still desperately in need of an editor, De La Pava is a hell of a writer.
June 18, 2018
Read this book,! Parts I liked were the chapter about Sylvester scarpetti anything with nuno, nelson de Cervantes, feniz, uh nina and dia and the joni Mitchell stuff just basically a real cool book lots of laughs and thrills yall
August 16, 2018
Nina Gill, daughter of the owner of the Dallas Cowboys has benn put aside. Her brother has inherited the team, even though she is the real great mind that has moved the team forward. But Nina hasn't told her last word yet. Having inherited an IFL team instead, she is determined to put the IFL on the map; and take her revenge in the process.
Nuno DeAngeles is preparing himself for one of the most ambitious crimes that have ever been committed. And, right now, he is doing all he can in order to get out of Rikers Island prison.
How are these two seemingly irrelevant lives going to collide?
Lost Empress was a very peculiar book to read. It definitely had amazing humor involved: both the narration and the dialogue were simply hilarious. It is fast-paced and compact. On the other hand, there was quite an abrupt change between characters throughout the story, and the narrative can feel tiring at times, making it a difficult read for some readers.
All in all it was an amusing book to read, just not a good fit for everyone.
Nuno DeAngeles is preparing himself for one of the most ambitious crimes that have ever been committed. And, right now, he is doing all he can in order to get out of Rikers Island prison.
How are these two seemingly irrelevant lives going to collide?
Lost Empress was a very peculiar book to read. It definitely had amazing humor involved: both the narration and the dialogue were simply hilarious. It is fast-paced and compact. On the other hand, there was quite an abrupt change between characters throughout the story, and the narrative can feel tiring at times, making it a difficult read for some readers.
All in all it was an amusing book to read, just not a good fit for everyone.
August 30, 2018
De la Pava is bonkers, and I love it. I discovered A Naked Singularity a few years ago in law school and eagerly devoured it. Recently it has resurfaced as I have begun to share it with numerous public defender friends, though who I get to relive the story. So, when I saw Lost Empress, I had to dive in.
It is De la Pava in all his glory. Explosively funny dialogue, brutally honest but often under appreciated perspectives on the criminal system, and...football? Why not. I'm sure there's some allegory here that I'm missing but at the end of the day if I enjoy the story then who cares.
All the old complaints old from the Theorists ranting to the story lines that sort of just don't connect (though I believe they all do) to a possibly completely irrational set of decisions made by otherwise realistic and lovable characters. But, that's what you're getting into with a SDLP!
I'm hooked, I'm love 'em, gimmie more!
It is De la Pava in all his glory. Explosively funny dialogue, brutally honest but often under appreciated perspectives on the criminal system, and...football? Why not. I'm sure there's some allegory here that I'm missing but at the end of the day if I enjoy the story then who cares.
All the old complaints old from the Theorists ranting to the story lines that sort of just don't connect (though I believe they all do) to a possibly completely irrational set of decisions made by otherwise realistic and lovable characters. But, that's what you're getting into with a SDLP!
I'm hooked, I'm love 'em, gimmie more!
June 20, 2018
I read the authors “A Naked Singularity” years ago and absolutely loved it. This however, was a gawd damn freaking slog to finish. Left me shaking my head that I kept thinking it would get better. What an idiot I was. Reading this book is like watching a television show that keeps getting interrupted for absurd news bulletins or car chases. The author leaves the main storyline and constantly takes off on riffs about damn near everything imaginable. Yeah, he did this in Naked Singularity but it worked into the storyline. A fiction author should write/tell a good story. Period. Not try to show off his supposed brilliance by pausing and expounding on the meaning of life, time warps etc etc ad nauseam. Sheesh. The worst problem and unpardonable sin is this isn’t even close to being a good story without all his “intellectual” sidebars.
May 15, 2018
Lost Empress by Sergio de la Pava is a novel so intellectually restless, so stuffed with ideas, that summary is futile. I’ll try anyway. The aging owner of the Dallas Cowboys is dividing his estate between his two children, and his daughter Nina gets the football team: the Paterson Pork of the Indoor Football Leauge, that is. Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles sits in a cell in Rikers Island plotting a truly outrageous crime. As Nuno plots his move, and Nina schemes to make the IFL a threat to the NFL, de la Pava’s prose spins out hilariously, philosophically, digressively, and gregariously. It’s a truly bonkers novel. During an off-the-wall court appearance late in the book, Nuno references both Moby-Dick and Hamlet. That seems about right.
July 12, 2018
Loved this book. An awesome amalgamation of social commentary, humor, law, mystery, relationships, and football. Yes, it is a bit strange at times, but it’s just so well-written and compelling. Hope there is a sequel!
July 28, 2018
It's not obvious that I would enjoy a book based on football, American or otherwise, but this is truly something special. The true scope of the narrative is breath-taking, but what really shone was some of the dialogue, showing deep humour despite the grandiosity.
October 24, 2018
DNF...I tried. I really did. But 200 pages in and I’m so over whatever the crap this is...
November 12, 2018
Gonzo, nutso, weirdo - all the words that end in 'o'. Written in a style that vacillates between exhausting and exhilarating, with the balance leaning positive. Often very funny & always very loud. Approaches 700 pages, so undertake with caution.
September 9, 2018
Brilliant. DFW if DFW had been a lawyer obsessing over the NFL and Joni Mitchell. Such interesting thoughts and language. Intricate, winding plots. Love.
June 21, 2018
Yes it's a pastiche but it's a pretty good one
Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews