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Babel de una noche de San Juan (LLibres del mall)
First published in Spain in 1983 and proclaimed "an instant postmodern classic, without a doubt the most disturbingly original Spanish prose of the century" (Encyclopedia Britannica 1985 Book of the Year), Larva is a rollicking account of a masquerade party in an abandoned mansion in London. Milalias (disguised as Don Juan) searches for Babelle (as Sleeping Beauty) though a linguistic funhouse of polylingual puns and wordplay recalling Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". A mock-scholarly commentary reveals the backgrounds of the masked revelers, while Ríos's punning and allusive language shows that words too wear masks, hiding an astonishing range of further meanings and implications.
Larva's tale, a reassessment of the Don Juan myth in our time, is told in single-minded pursuit of double meanings, but it is serious play. It revives a Hispanic tradition repressed for centuries by introducing the Madhatter English tradition of puns, palindromes, and acrostics, by creating Joycean echoes and pushing language to its maximum connotative capacity. Larva has been praised by such leading Spanish-language writers as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, and Severo Sarduy, and establishes Ríos as the most accomplished successor to Joyce.
Larva's tale, a reassessment of the Don Juan myth in our time, is told in single-minded pursuit of double meanings, but it is serious play. It revives a Hispanic tradition repressed for centuries by introducing the Madhatter English tradition of puns, palindromes, and acrostics, by creating Joycean echoes and pushing language to its maximum connotative capacity. Larva has been praised by such leading Spanish-language writers as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, and Severo Sarduy, and establishes Ríos as the most accomplished successor to Joyce.
598 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1984
14 people are currently reading
1762 people want to read
About the author
Julián Ríos
31 books34 followersJulián Ríos (born Vigo, Galicia, 1941) is a Spanish writer, most frequently classified as a postmodernist, whom Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has called "the most inventive and creative" of Spanish-language writers. His first two books were written à deux with Octavio Paz.
His best known work, experimental and heavily influenced by the verbal inventiveness of James Joyce, was published in 1983 under the title Larva.
Julián Ríos currently lives and works in France, on the outskirts of Paris
His best known work, experimental and heavily influenced by the verbal inventiveness of James Joyce, was published in 1983 under the title Larva.
Julián Ríos currently lives and works in France, on the outskirts of Paris
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
June 20, 2024
Larva: A Midsummer Night’s Babel is A Midsummer Night's Dream, Don Juan,
One Thousand and One Nights
and
The Revelation of Saint John the Divine
rolled into one… But everything is written in Julián Ríos’ matchlessly unique style of the macaronic puns, word hybrids, lexical concatenations, burlesque quibbles, outlandish eggcorns and enigmatic palindromes:
Milalias – meaning A Thousand Monikers – disguised as Don Juan and Babelle – meaning Babel Beauty or the Whore of Babylon – wearing the mask of Sleeping Beauty are the main partakers in the evil carnival of the estival solstice celebration.
To read the novel is tantamount to wriggling one’s way in the jungle of words and tearing through the fireworks of crazy scenes…
And this flamboyant cosmic festivity is an apocalyptic masquerade and the last supper of gluttony and earthly delights…
Ever since the tale of Adam and Eve told in Genesis sexual relationships remain central in all arts.
((Perhaps she went out to clear her head? And to shake herself free from the distorting refractions. Still sleepwalking she dreamily droned her spell – her abracodabraxas! her talismantra! her reincantation! – seeing herself and the others, the other masks, being distortured in the mirrors that nearly covered the walls and ceiling of that dizzying hall.))
Milalias – meaning A Thousand Monikers – disguised as Don Juan and Babelle – meaning Babel Beauty or the Whore of Babylon – wearing the mask of Sleeping Beauty are the main partakers in the evil carnival of the estival solstice celebration.
To read the novel is tantamount to wriggling one’s way in the jungle of words and tearing through the fireworks of crazy scenes…
Ooh la la! here comes Sinbad the Mooriner…, and she went back to launching her lance. Simba, Simbad!
Rock and roll! Rock! the egg-globe clinging to the outflung skirts of the gyrating Pompadour. Rocambolesque rock ma rococotte! the turbaned Moor rasped as he rock-and-rolled the white globe along. Dance, egg, dance!
Shilly-shally that empty shell, Spinbad! the Pompadour jumped and pipe-jabbed the balloon to keep it aloft. Sambad, Simbad! And then she rubbed it, belly to belly, dynamic static, and scrambled off faster still, Ayay! making a face. Now don’t you rock and don’t you roll…
Pluck the clover…
And this flamboyant cosmic festivity is an apocalyptic masquerade and the last supper of gluttony and earthly delights…
Hey wait! Don Juan rushing after Sleeping Beauty, Every don has his dame…, who was resolutely sleepwalking ( : toward the door?) through the crush of snaking masks, murmuring her double half words. Wait! This one won’t eat in or out! Live and let dine.
Manducemos et bibamos…, dissonated the monk in blackface with a chef’s hat, fiddling with his onion rosary. Let’s eat and drink as much as we can, tomorrow’s just another day. Another day, another diet! Eat, for tomorrow you’ll be eaten. A good bite and a good scream.
Ever since the tale of Adam and Eve told in Genesis sexual relationships remain central in all arts.
January 6, 2016
The most pun-drunk of the pun-drunk novels. A novel with a toxic volume of Joyce in its bloodstream, laughing on its trip to the intensive care ward to have further puns pumped from its stomach. A brutal attack on the conventions of reading—its verso ‘footnotes’ and later-page ‘endnotes’—perform the same warping as in Jacques Roubaud’s Great Fire of London novels. A feast for fans of multilingual punnage from heaven. Simply sublime, sublime, sublime. Simply.
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June 1, 2016Yes. I do wonder sometimes Why I do this to myself. UnreadaBABEL. A Larva’s Midslumber Knot’s Blather.
Most of what is probably useful to be said about Larva has been said by me in Poundemonium which is Book Two of Five, Larva equals Book One. Pound is good warm-up ground ; Larva is larger and therefore better. But its set-up is pretty much the same as that of Pound -- text in three places plus a map, photos, etc. Brilliant. Nabokov got a pale approach with his fire.
So this is what I don’t get :: I get it that like me after a day’s work etc etc a person is exhausted, mentally and emotionally and physically ; and resigning the convenience of Television, Said Person may want to pick=up a book....... to relax. And therefore naturally Said Person doesn’t want to read something difficult, but something composed of conventional sentences, characters, plot. The thing I don’t get is, Why do you want to go through all the work of following characters, projecting yourself into their inner=lives, etc etc etc, keeping the trail of a PLOT, etc etc etc ..... it seems like an awful lot of mental and emotional work, when all Said Person wants to do is...... relax. So, what I’m recommending Larva for is for those times when you are so mentally and emotionally exhausted that you have no energy for performing those things such as character and plot construction etc. LARVA will allow you to rest and relax peacefully upon the shiny glimmering surface of single words, of single phrases, of a single sentence, upon a series of alliteration of puns of pranks of...... play, which is what one does (play) when one desires to recuperate from the rigors of the day. If you believe that you have to figure out what is going on in LARVA, I’d suggest you leave your high school engelisch teacher in his classroom, go out to the monkey bars and just monkey around with those lovely lovely words.
For your relaxation and recuperation requirement, I provide The Greatest Piece of Music Ever Written .
Most of what is probably useful to be said about Larva has been said by me in Poundemonium which is Book Two of Five, Larva equals Book One. Pound is good warm-up ground ; Larva is larger and therefore better. But its set-up is pretty much the same as that of Pound -- text in three places plus a map, photos, etc. Brilliant. Nabokov got a pale approach with his fire.
So this is what I don’t get :: I get it that like me after a day’s work etc etc a person is exhausted, mentally and emotionally and physically ; and resigning the convenience of Television, Said Person may want to pick=up a book....... to relax. And therefore naturally Said Person doesn’t want to read something difficult, but something composed of conventional sentences, characters, plot. The thing I don’t get is, Why do you want to go through all the work of following characters, projecting yourself into their inner=lives, etc etc etc, keeping the trail of a PLOT, etc etc etc ..... it seems like an awful lot of mental and emotional work, when all Said Person wants to do is...... relax. So, what I’m recommending Larva for is for those times when you are so mentally and emotionally exhausted that you have no energy for performing those things such as character and plot construction etc. LARVA will allow you to rest and relax peacefully upon the shiny glimmering surface of single words, of single phrases, of a single sentence, upon a series of alliteration of puns of pranks of...... play, which is what one does (play) when one desires to recuperate from the rigors of the day. If you believe that you have to figure out what is going on in LARVA, I’d suggest you leave your high school engelisch teacher in his classroom, go out to the monkey bars and just monkey around with those lovely lovely words.
For your relaxation and recuperation requirement, I provide The Greatest Piece of Music Ever Written .
January 20, 2016
About as coherent as an orgy, this novel is a sensual overload of languages. Bilingual puns and deviously constructed portmanteaus abound on every page like so many entangled limbs, sweat and various other fragrant excretions. In a nutshell, this novel retells the Don Juan story recasted in London during the late 20th century and with the entirety of the "action" being a wild masquerade where our hero, Milalias--masked, mostly, as Don Juan--endlessly seeks our heroine, Babelle--disguised, usually, as Sleeping Beauty--through a torrent of deranged revelers impersonating a mad litany of literary figures, real and fictional, and every last one of them drunk on an excess of wordplay. But conventional narrative flow is impeded by a left-hand page of footnotes facing every right-hand page of the story proper. And you'll need two bookmarks because many of these footnotes lead to a section of endnotes that elaborate on many of the sexual conquests of Milalias and Babelle. But really all this synopsizing trivializes the experience of the book. Larva is a tower of languages, a bacchanal of zesty wordplay, a dense construct that is bound by its own confounding rules and logic, the kind of book that deserves an exhaustive companion text like The New Bloomsday Book or the Annotations to Finnegans Wake. Will appeal only to readers perfectly game with the notion of trading comprehension for verbal ecstacy. One final thought: the fact that this book was translated so dazzlingly well is a goddamned marvel. People should appreciate translators more.
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August 8, 2023One of A Number of Books Supposedly Influenced by Finnegans Wake
Julián Ríos’s book Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel (1983, English translation 1991) is a 585-page experimental novel, intended as the first of a set of five, with a chapter of photographs, and graphics scattered throughout the text. The table of contents lists eight named chapters or sections, one with five named subsections.
The last two are odd: the penultimate section is "Babelle’s Photo Album," which is 34 pages of photos of London, in alphabetical order according to location, preceded by a color foldout map of Fulham and Chelsea. The final section is an "Index of Names" -- proper names cited in the book.
The third-to-last section is "Pillow Notes," a series of end notes comprising an independent story about wandering through London. Every other section or chapter, 450 pages of material, is arranged as text on right-facing pages and footnotes on left-facing pages. In this way a reader turns each page and reads the right-facing page, sometimes pausing to consult the footnotes on the left, and occasionally turning to the end notes in the "Pillow Notes" section.
The organization is experimental. So is the language, which is full of puns and portmanteau words that must have been difficult to translate. (The book was translated by Richard Francis, Suzanne Levine, and the author, and it won a translation prize.)
Ríos is often said to be influenced by, or to be answering, Joyce's Finnegans Wake. But the notes and formatting mayowe more Arno Schmidt than Joyce (Nabokov's Pale Fire has also been cited, but it's an overused point of reference; compulsive scholarly annotation is more an interest of Schmidt's), and the precedent for Ríos's wordplay is more Schmidt than Finnegans Wake. There are also demonstrably other obsessions in Ríos's project: the third book in the projected five-volume series, Poundemonium, is nominally a response to the Cantos.
Larva is determinedly unserious (in that sense, like Finnegans Wake) and consistently lascivious and oversexed (and in that sense very much like Schmidt's obsessions with nymphets and unlike Joyce's contorted and stifled narratives of HCE and Issy). Larva is stuffed with every simple pun the author could imagine. "Pots and puns! and lick 'em all clean," he writes on p. 139. The wordplay is mainly sexual, and sometimes literary. To me, the puns are compulsive, not funny, and seldom engaging. When they are at their most inventive, they can be reminiscent of Finnegans Wake, for example on pp. 151-3 where short paragraphs play on multilingual near-rhymes: "Back! Bak! Vade retro, bakuninlinguist"; "Slaap! Sleep! Sloop! Pillow talk"; "Raaskallen! Rusk a la carte, rascals..." and so forth.
To my ear there are few such passages. A chunk of prose on p. 363 reads like an attempt to emulate Finnegans Wake, and there are other examples. On p. 413 there's a long word, which is an onomatopoeic scream in a dozen languages:
"Krioskrigcritschreihuutocrijeritanskrikkkrikkrzykscreamkialtaskravyischreeuw!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
This is an echo of the "thunder words" in Finnegans Wake, especially the long word for Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the "scream" comes at a crux in the book, after Ríos has spent a full 60 pages listing all the women his narrator has known. (This happens in an unnamed subsection of a subsection of the book -- a fact that signals how random the table of contents is in some respects.) After the "Scream" comes a new section, "Blackout."
The majority of the book is not especially sensitive to verbal strategies other than puns, homonyms, and rhymes, and the prose seldom rewards rereading. In Finnegans Wake, close reading will typically reveal layers of meaning pertinent to the narrative; this is more a kind of stream-of-consciousness multilingualism. Again more proximate model is Arno Schmidt, who was just as beset by relentless lasciviousness (and sexism), and who also loved drama, theater, and breathless expositions.
There are a half-dozen exceptions to the Larva's doctrinaire unseriousness, and they stand out oddly. On p. 25 there's a paragraph about a woman beaten by "a psychopathic Sikh" until she is "almost unrecognizable." These serious passages come and go without motivation, and the effect is that the author seems insouciant and irresponsible about his own material -- and also afraid of being serious, even while he is wildly ambitious as a novelist.
As in Finnegans Wake, there are metafictional references to the book itself, which rehearse different possible meanings and justifications for Larva. On p. 30, a footnote on "volume voluminous!" calls the book a "paraodyssey," and says of the author (in the third person) that "his graphomanionanism" was "living the written," which sounds to me at once vague and self-aggrandizing. Page 434 has a better version of the book, calling it a "black novel."
As an approximation, I would describe this book as an attempt to write alongside Schmidt -- or, since I don't know if Ríos was aware of Schmidt -- along with a flattened notion of Joyce that Schmidt shared -- and to do so by being as carefree, obscene, fragmented, random, and compulsive with language, plot, sense, and narrative as possible. In theory that could have produced a good result, and the book's formatting (left-facing footnotes, end notes, photographs) is promising, but the result is both intentionally and unintentionally tiring.
It's sometimes said in the Joyce scholarship that Ríos is one of the principal authors influenced by Finnegans Wake. But that scholarship has a very unresolved formulation of books said to be influenced by Finnegans Wake. See for example Sam Slote, “‘Odds Without Ends’: Raymond Queneau and the Twisted Language of the Wake,” especially n. 2, citing David Hayman's anthology In the Wake of the Wake (1978), which is an unaccountably miscellaneous collection of authors said to constitute the influence of Finnegans Wake. That book remains an anomaly in its lack of any coherent historical reception outside of the academic Joyce industry. It's not that Larva isn't influenced by Finnegans Wake, or at least made possible by it: it's that if books like this are the signs of Finnegans Wake's presence in literature, then it isn't really present. Or, to put it in Harold Bloom's terms, if Larva counts as a response to Finnegans Wake, then its author may have been too traumatized by that book to think clearly about it.
This text is part of a longer account of the images in Larva, on this site.
Julián Ríos’s book Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel (1983, English translation 1991) is a 585-page experimental novel, intended as the first of a set of five, with a chapter of photographs, and graphics scattered throughout the text. The table of contents lists eight named chapters or sections, one with five named subsections.
The last two are odd: the penultimate section is "Babelle’s Photo Album," which is 34 pages of photos of London, in alphabetical order according to location, preceded by a color foldout map of Fulham and Chelsea. The final section is an "Index of Names" -- proper names cited in the book.
The third-to-last section is "Pillow Notes," a series of end notes comprising an independent story about wandering through London. Every other section or chapter, 450 pages of material, is arranged as text on right-facing pages and footnotes on left-facing pages. In this way a reader turns each page and reads the right-facing page, sometimes pausing to consult the footnotes on the left, and occasionally turning to the end notes in the "Pillow Notes" section.
The organization is experimental. So is the language, which is full of puns and portmanteau words that must have been difficult to translate. (The book was translated by Richard Francis, Suzanne Levine, and the author, and it won a translation prize.)
Ríos is often said to be influenced by, or to be answering, Joyce's Finnegans Wake. But the notes and formatting mayowe more Arno Schmidt than Joyce (Nabokov's Pale Fire has also been cited, but it's an overused point of reference; compulsive scholarly annotation is more an interest of Schmidt's), and the precedent for Ríos's wordplay is more Schmidt than Finnegans Wake. There are also demonstrably other obsessions in Ríos's project: the third book in the projected five-volume series, Poundemonium, is nominally a response to the Cantos.
Larva is determinedly unserious (in that sense, like Finnegans Wake) and consistently lascivious and oversexed (and in that sense very much like Schmidt's obsessions with nymphets and unlike Joyce's contorted and stifled narratives of HCE and Issy). Larva is stuffed with every simple pun the author could imagine. "Pots and puns! and lick 'em all clean," he writes on p. 139. The wordplay is mainly sexual, and sometimes literary. To me, the puns are compulsive, not funny, and seldom engaging. When they are at their most inventive, they can be reminiscent of Finnegans Wake, for example on pp. 151-3 where short paragraphs play on multilingual near-rhymes: "Back! Bak! Vade retro, bakuninlinguist"; "Slaap! Sleep! Sloop! Pillow talk"; "Raaskallen! Rusk a la carte, rascals..." and so forth.
To my ear there are few such passages. A chunk of prose on p. 363 reads like an attempt to emulate Finnegans Wake, and there are other examples. On p. 413 there's a long word, which is an onomatopoeic scream in a dozen languages:
"Krioskrigcritschreihuutocrijeritanskrikkkrikkrzykscreamkialtaskravyischreeuw!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
This is an echo of the "thunder words" in Finnegans Wake, especially the long word for Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the "scream" comes at a crux in the book, after Ríos has spent a full 60 pages listing all the women his narrator has known. (This happens in an unnamed subsection of a subsection of the book -- a fact that signals how random the table of contents is in some respects.) After the "Scream" comes a new section, "Blackout."
The majority of the book is not especially sensitive to verbal strategies other than puns, homonyms, and rhymes, and the prose seldom rewards rereading. In Finnegans Wake, close reading will typically reveal layers of meaning pertinent to the narrative; this is more a kind of stream-of-consciousness multilingualism. Again more proximate model is Arno Schmidt, who was just as beset by relentless lasciviousness (and sexism), and who also loved drama, theater, and breathless expositions.
There are a half-dozen exceptions to the Larva's doctrinaire unseriousness, and they stand out oddly. On p. 25 there's a paragraph about a woman beaten by "a psychopathic Sikh" until she is "almost unrecognizable." These serious passages come and go without motivation, and the effect is that the author seems insouciant and irresponsible about his own material -- and also afraid of being serious, even while he is wildly ambitious as a novelist.
As in Finnegans Wake, there are metafictional references to the book itself, which rehearse different possible meanings and justifications for Larva. On p. 30, a footnote on "volume voluminous!" calls the book a "paraodyssey," and says of the author (in the third person) that "his graphomanionanism" was "living the written," which sounds to me at once vague and self-aggrandizing. Page 434 has a better version of the book, calling it a "black novel."
As an approximation, I would describe this book as an attempt to write alongside Schmidt -- or, since I don't know if Ríos was aware of Schmidt -- along with a flattened notion of Joyce that Schmidt shared -- and to do so by being as carefree, obscene, fragmented, random, and compulsive with language, plot, sense, and narrative as possible. In theory that could have produced a good result, and the book's formatting (left-facing footnotes, end notes, photographs) is promising, but the result is both intentionally and unintentionally tiring.
It's sometimes said in the Joyce scholarship that Ríos is one of the principal authors influenced by Finnegans Wake. But that scholarship has a very unresolved formulation of books said to be influenced by Finnegans Wake. See for example Sam Slote, “‘Odds Without Ends’: Raymond Queneau and the Twisted Language of the Wake,” especially n. 2, citing David Hayman's anthology In the Wake of the Wake (1978), which is an unaccountably miscellaneous collection of authors said to constitute the influence of Finnegans Wake. That book remains an anomaly in its lack of any coherent historical reception outside of the academic Joyce industry. It's not that Larva isn't influenced by Finnegans Wake, or at least made possible by it: it's that if books like this are the signs of Finnegans Wake's presence in literature, then it isn't really present. Or, to put it in Harold Bloom's terms, if Larva counts as a response to Finnegans Wake, then its author may have been too traumatized by that book to think clearly about it.
This text is part of a longer account of the images in Larva, on this site.
September 19, 2016
To be honest you cannot really read a book like Larva once. It’s got so many layers and hidden meanings that the first reading is almost superficial. In essence if you strip away the wordplay , the side notes, footnotes , illustrations and pictures you get a simple romance. Man sees a woman fleetingly at a party and then spends the rest of the bash chasing her and , spoiler alert , he gets her and live happily ever after.
Now in-between that is a party of the most hedonistic proportions ever. Sex , drugs , food , fights , puppets , EVERYTHING is going on in the most crazy and insane fashion and it’s all told through tons , no millions of puns.
Larva is a book about how to make the most out of a word. It is all about punnage and nothing else. The amount of wordplay is absolutely mind boggling and a lot of them are hilarious, and this was just my first reading.Imagine what else will emerge if I pick it up again in 5 years time. Plus it does help if you know at least three languages , a working grasp of films and of London. It’s not necessary but it helps.
I know in the past I have lambasted the experimental novels in this list but this one is truly special – and unique. In fact I couldn’t put it down , which is weird as I’m quite a slow reader.
I guess I should really re read an Infinite Jest then?
February 4, 2012
A wild linguistic ride. Reminiscent of Joyce with inventive puns and other wordplay overwhelming a story of a modern Don Juan in London. Really there's not much story and with the footnotes and other distractions, that's just fine. It's a book that is more about the path than the destination. Enjoy it for its surface and its fantastic picture of London.
May 6, 2023
The relentless wordplay (sometimes in multiple languages) quickly became tiring, especially as it wasn't backing up any discernable plot or philosophical views. Mostly a litany of "hippy chick's" lined up for sexual exploits. Oh what fun the 70s were! Ha!
January 10, 2019
How this was translated from Spanish must be a story as or even more complicated as the book itself. It took two other translators, along with Ríos, and more than 6 years. If the puns, alliterations, anagrams and palindromes were originally in Spanish, how the hell do you do it in English all over again? This translation feat is up there with any of Finnegans Wake to another language. Though the Wake is already in another language...
March 16, 2024
A word-spinning orgy of puntastic shenanigans (with a map and photos) about losing the plot mid a saucy masquerade in 1970's London. (Pro): brilliantly wayward drunken writing. (Con): you'll start to feel queasy when you've read a page too many.
January 11, 2009
This was wonderful. It's a mad story with mad language and mad structure. I'm sure Shandy was handy. And fine, again, Finnegan too, "again" because it's obvious. But Shandy's handiness too.
Obviously, I'm not as good as Rios. Heh.
Obviously, I'm not as good as Rios. Heh.
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December 12, 2018Read every single word in there and still have no clue what was going on.
Read
January 30, 2022Fuera de concurso. Imposible valorar este libro con los "estándares tradicionales"
August 16, 2015
Some books are written to tell an amazing story. Some books are written to paint amazing pictures with their prose. Some books are written to show off with word play and make the reader's brain work hard. This last group is my least favorite kind, and Larva is a perfect example. I should have taken it as a warning that one of the critics said it was inspired by Finnegan's Wake.
The story (and I use that term loosely) is about a masquerade party in an abandoned mansion in London. A Don Juan character is chasing a masked Sleeping Beauty. We are introduced to character after character and there is an overt sexuality to the whole text (because of Don Juan? perhaps).
Now, the reason I stuck with it and why I can appreciate it (to a point) is because the language and word play is incredibly inventive. Rios regularly blends words together- "serpententrations", "savoraciously" and changes the spelling ("fournication") to convey double meaning. It's clever and witty and funny... and exhausting. Instead of immersing myself in a story, my brain was always working on overdrive. I had to read in small doses and by the end, I just wanted it to be over.
I can imagine the translation of this book took an extraordinary amount of work. I tip my hat to the author and translators.
Food: an all-night pub crawl with everyone speaking at least two languages. It takes some effort even from the beginning, but by the end, it's all a blur.
The story (and I use that term loosely) is about a masquerade party in an abandoned mansion in London. A Don Juan character is chasing a masked Sleeping Beauty. We are introduced to character after character and there is an overt sexuality to the whole text (because of Don Juan? perhaps).
Now, the reason I stuck with it and why I can appreciate it (to a point) is because the language and word play is incredibly inventive. Rios regularly blends words together- "serpententrations", "savoraciously" and changes the spelling ("fournication") to convey double meaning. It's clever and witty and funny... and exhausting. Instead of immersing myself in a story, my brain was always working on overdrive. I had to read in small doses and by the end, I just wanted it to be over.
I can imagine the translation of this book took an extraordinary amount of work. I tip my hat to the author and translators.
Food: an all-night pub crawl with everyone speaking at least two languages. It takes some effort even from the beginning, but by the end, it's all a blur.
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September 13, 2019Well...I definitely read this. In a sense. Somehow, I find myself not wanting to rate it, because I'm authentically ambivalent about the value of a project like this, and maybe there are multiple, contradictory right answers at once. Still, I feel like everyone fixating on the language here is a bit of a cop-out: because, yeah, that's a big part of it, but there's clearly more to it than that, only I didn't get it and I don't think you did either, honestly, which is why you have nothing to say about it, and that's not necessarily a problem, but it's a bit hard to evaluate. It's definitely something.
August 5, 2017
This book was a lot of fun, with wacky wordplay and mythological characters aplenty. It takes place in a masquerade party-slash-drug orgy in London in the 70s; an expatriate Spanish writer is dressed as Don Juan and looking for his girlfriend, who is playing Sleeping Beauty amidst the dreamlike chaos. I'm a Joyce fan, so I really enjoyed the puns, portmanteau words, and the literary allusions.
September 3, 2024
Es una novela compleja, llena de referencias a diversas obras de la literatura universal, muchas de las cuales aún no he leído. Esto me ha impedido comprender completamente el juego metaliterario que propone el autor. Además, la mezcla de idiomas tampoco facilita la lectura. Sin embargo, lo que logré entender, que estimo en un 70% (o quizá menos :( ), fue una maravilla. Es uno de esos "delicatessen" literarios que de vez en cuando no vienen mal. La estructura, con notas y notas a las notas, es también un recurso interesante. Además, las notas al final del texto no son solo explicaciones; son pequeños cuentos que ofrecen un contrapunto, funcionando como un respiro frente a la laberíntica historia principal. Espero que, a medida que aumente mi bagaje lector, pueda volver a esta novela y disfrutarla aún más.
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February 11, 2023Ibo solía repetirme una y otra vez que la leyera a tiermpo, cuando no estaba traducida a la lengua de Shakespeare todavía. Opté temporalmente por un libro parecido, Tres Tristes Tigres, por tratarse de un pariente de mi admirada musa palaciega. Pero al cabo creo que Arnaldo logró encontrar un libro paralelo del mismo Ríos, Poundemonium, la por él llamada Sexpedición del poeta norteamericano al Distrito Rojo de Londres, donde por cierto cuenta que no encontró a nadie. Y no podía ir a Dublin para dar la romería a Pub Araby. Si apareciera, RV.
November 19, 2024
Magnífica novela de Julián Ríos, o debería decir: "magníficas novelas". En la página impar, unas notas aclaratorias delirantes van construyendo una historia llena de surrealismo y color. A través de las páginas pares, nos adentramos en la fiesta loca. La historia, en sus delirios, su poesía, su lado grotesco, se sigue sorprendentemente bien. Un aplauso a Jeckill por rescatar una novela experimental como esta. No quiero imaginarme cómo debió ser el proceso de corrección y edición. Una joya que me ha divertido muchísimo, puro goce.
May 6, 2024
Been reading this fantasmal tome on-'n-off for years admiring the author's chutzpah and finesse.
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