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El libro de todos los amores
Venecia en algún momento del siglo XXI. La humanidad se encamina, sin saberlo, al colapso mientras una pareja recorre la ciudad, ajena a las señales que anuncian el final de la sociedad tal y como la conocemos. Él es profesor de Latín y disfruta de un año sabático; ella es escritora y trabaja en un ensayo sobre el amor. Ambos están destinados a jugar un papel fundamental en la transición hacia un nuevo mundo.
El libro de todos los amores ofrece una nueva mirada sobre un tema universal e indaga en las diferentes dinámicas que el amor adopta, tanto en el ámbito íntimo de la pareja como en otros aspectos de la vida pública, como la política, la economíao la ciencia.
Jugando con estilos y géneros, mezclando hábilmente ficción, poesía y ensayo, Agustín Fernández Mallo ha escrito una fascinante novela filosófica que apuesta radicalmente por la esperanza desde la distopía del presente.
El libro de todos los amores ofrece una nueva mirada sobre un tema universal e indaga en las diferentes dinámicas que el amor adopta, tanto en el ámbito íntimo de la pareja como en otros aspectos de la vida pública, como la política, la economíao la ciencia.
Jugando con estilos y géneros, mezclando hábilmente ficción, poesía y ensayo, Agustín Fernández Mallo ha escrito una fascinante novela filosófica que apuesta radicalmente por la esperanza desde la distopía del presente.
248 pages, Paperback
First published February 9, 2022
94 people are currently reading
2741 people want to read
About the author
Agustín Fernández Mallo
40 books231 followersAgustín Fernández Mallo (A Coruña, 1967) es un físico y escritor español afincado en Palma de Mallorca. Es uno de los miembros más destacados de la llamada Generación Nocilla, Generación Mutante o Afterpop, cuya denominación más popular procede del título de una serie de sus novelas.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 139 reviews
December 2, 2025
Translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead
The Book of All loves is a strange book to explain and review, but I will try. It is structured in two parts which alternate. The 1st part comprises of philosophic /erotic dialogues between two lovers. After each dialogue we are treated with a definition of a kind of love. Below are two examples which illustrates the writing style of this part:
“Another way of understanding things is to say that we come from a darkness and are moving towards another darkness. Between the two there is only a brief candle, a match pointlessly struck, although everyone's soul gets its corporate branding in the end. (Match love)”
“Every night, while you sleep, your eyelids are the sluice gates of a river that stop me from swimming back up your body, from entering you. Outside, meanwhile, the valley awaits the sun in darkness, and I spend the time thinking of its perpetual snow and of the nameless birds who in that moment will be cutting through the air above it. At times, this sort of mineral silence gives rise to a noise that excavates the darkness, leaving it not only shorn of its silence but riddled, hollow.
- she says.
Hollow space filled with fears and solitude, hollow space for all the surplus, the overspill, the remainders. Noise is only music we don't yet understand.
- he says.”
The other part is a bit more straight forward. There is a resemblance of plot. A married couple from Uruguay visit Venice before the Great Blackout, a catastrophe which will wipe our most people. As they try to visit the city, strange things begin to occur around them. The plot is also surreal and philosophic.
Many loved the essay part a bit more than the Venice episodes. I appreciated the latter more. However, I liked this book with all its strangeness and I am hoping to read more by the author. I own The Things We’ve Seen which seems to be more Sebaldesque, which is excellent.
The Book of All loves is a strange book to explain and review, but I will try. It is structured in two parts which alternate. The 1st part comprises of philosophic /erotic dialogues between two lovers. After each dialogue we are treated with a definition of a kind of love. Below are two examples which illustrates the writing style of this part:
“Another way of understanding things is to say that we come from a darkness and are moving towards another darkness. Between the two there is only a brief candle, a match pointlessly struck, although everyone's soul gets its corporate branding in the end. (Match love)”
“Every night, while you sleep, your eyelids are the sluice gates of a river that stop me from swimming back up your body, from entering you. Outside, meanwhile, the valley awaits the sun in darkness, and I spend the time thinking of its perpetual snow and of the nameless birds who in that moment will be cutting through the air above it. At times, this sort of mineral silence gives rise to a noise that excavates the darkness, leaving it not only shorn of its silence but riddled, hollow.
- she says.
Hollow space filled with fears and solitude, hollow space for all the surplus, the overspill, the remainders. Noise is only music we don't yet understand.
- he says.”
The other part is a bit more straight forward. There is a resemblance of plot. A married couple from Uruguay visit Venice before the Great Blackout, a catastrophe which will wipe our most people. As they try to visit the city, strange things begin to occur around them. The plot is also surreal and philosophic.
Many loved the essay part a bit more than the Venice episodes. I appreciated the latter more. However, I liked this book with all its strangeness and I am hoping to read more by the author. I own The Things We’ve Seen which seems to be more Sebaldesque, which is excellent.
December 3, 2023
I've found my desert island book.
September 12, 2024
This book was incredibly unique, often times hard to navigate and equally filled with so much hope and despair. Following a couple in the face of 'The Great Blackout,' they narrate theories on varying kinds of love. This is made up of essays, poetry and often times felt as if it tilted more non fiction that fiction... it was incredibly disjointed.
I adored the essay sections and found so many of these 'loves' fascinating to read about, but that was practically it. As much as I enjoyed certain elements it was completely different to what I was expecting. No plot, not much character analysis (I think that's the point) and it made my reading experience quite slow, at times.
3.5 stars
I adored the essay sections and found so many of these 'loves' fascinating to read about, but that was practically it. As much as I enjoyed certain elements it was completely different to what I was expecting. No plot, not much character analysis (I think that's the point) and it made my reading experience quite slow, at times.
3.5 stars
November 18, 2024
Winner of the 2024 Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation
The Book of All Loves (2024) is translated by Thomas Bunstead, a writer in his own right as well as translator of Juan José Millás, Maria Gainza, Enrique Avila-Matis and others as well as author of a trilogy of novels inspired by a punk song.
This is a fascinatingly structured novel and one that would reward multiple reads as noted by Claire Oshetsky in her blurb.
The novel comes in two alternating sections.
The first (in order of appearance in the novel although later temporally) is set in a transformed world after the Great Blackout, a cataclysmic event, marked by fire and rain, that seems to have wiped out all but two of the human race, two lovers, a woman and man referred to simply as she and he. The repeated references in their conversation of a “the first bird that came and landed on our windowsill after the Great Blackout” gives this a Noah’s Ark feel (though there the bird's were released) although when we discover later the new names by which they call each other it comes from rather earlier in Genesis.
This part of the novel, in turn, consists of two alternating voices.
a) Aprohistic exchanges between the two on their love in this new world.
After the Great Blackout, our hair suddenly turned white. Like the snow on these mountains, which fell one morning and has never gone away.
– she says.
Even polar bear fur isn’t white. If you look at each hair closely, one at a time, you’ll see that it’s transparent.
– he says.
That’s all we get of their lives - a dystopian world-building story this isn’t.
b) entries from an encyclopaedia of different aspects of love (presumably the titular Book of All Loves). These draw on different aspects of science and culture, although often making rather sweeping and questionable assertions (a Wiki novel this also isn’t):
The Vikings, voyaging to the Mediterranean from their frozen northern seas, did not do so hugging the coasts of what we nowadays call Europe. Rather they crossed the continent along the Rhine and other watercourses, skilfully connecting one to the next; navigating fresh water to join two bodies of salt water via the shortest possible route: a kind of cultural geodesic. Along the way they burned towns, animals and the land itself, plundering anything of value – but leaving the flowers on the waysides and, in the cases where they were embroidered, the drapery in people’s houses too. It was not that they disliked these things, but that they were invisible to them – the Viking eye untrained for detecting that class of object. Nor did they plunder the beaches themselves when they arrived in what is now Italy; the grains of sand were so smooth, so spherical and gleaming that they did not even see them. What kind of shortest-line-between-two-points is this, then, that ‘does not see things’? The birds migrating to this continent in the present day also bear in their sexual organs a layer of stamens and ancient minerals that they cannot see and yet scatter as they go.(Geodesic love)
The second section is set, immediately pre the Great Blackout, in Venice, a city chosen by the author as the birthplace of capitalism and hence a fitting place to witness its dramatic end:
The writer taps away, as we've said, there is a nervous energy to her striking of the typewriter's keys, she has barely slept in days, the snow globe on the desk shakes, making it snow in the miniature version ofthe city whose canals Lord Byron boasted of having swum in winter, the city that was the birthplace of the butcher who in later centuries would be Charles Manson's inspiration, whose prisons Giacomo Casanova escaped and in whose waters Richard Wagner drowned, the city where the first bank cheque was signed and capitalism invented...
The couple in this section came to the city on holiday, renting a floor of a palazzo, some months earlier. But he decided, after something of a crisis of confidence, to stay in the city, working on a Latin translation project, one possibly connnected to the start of some strange happenings in Venice:
On the way back, snow began to fall, and they tried to go through St Mark's Square but found it had been cordoned off: although nobody could explain why, it appeared that a great bubble of total soundlessness had installed itself in that part ofthe city. 'When you enter the square, all sound disappears,' said the policeman at the cordon, who was wearing a camouflage face mask, 'it's as though your ears have been emptied out, it's never happened anywhere before, no one knows of anything like it — plus, as well as this total lack of sound, anyone who goes out into the middle gets an intense migraine.
She, however, went back to Montevideo, but has now, at the time this section is set, returned to the city, itself largely deserted, other than for blind and lost people, as the bubble of soundless have spread and robbed people of other senses. While she writes on her typewriter the entries on love that we are reading in the first section, the two are approached by their landlord, a mysterious man who styles himself The Ambassador, and who wants to prepare them for their role as the chosen one to build a new world, a world where love will be restored.
These sections have the mysterious atmosphere of a Hitchcock or a David Lynch film. An Alexa in their apartment, sent specially by The Ambassador, haunts them with its blinking blue light. The writer asks her erudite husband the origins of the name:
After a few moments' thought, and also speaking very quietly, he said: 'It's an abbreviation of Alexandra a Greek name that means protectress of humanity' She was about to say something else, but understood that his slow response had been because he was falling asleep — she knew he didn't want for knowledge in dead languages — as demonstrated by the successive snores that followed.
She curled up into a ball under the sheets and thought what Alexa would be making of these shapeless sounds issuing from some place in her husband's throat. The next day, as soon as they were woken by the sunlight breaking through the blinds, they shared an unusually long, deep kiss, and, as though he had spent the night considering her question, the first thing he said when they broke off was, 'I should also say that the great Greek poem recounting the end of the world is called Alexandra, Lycophron wrote it and it gives a complete account of Greece's history, from Troy to the Roman conquest, an entire civilization hurtling towards extinction.'
And the novel ends powerfully as their Alexa “begins to emit a sound, a powerful moan; her ring of blue light pulses in way neither of them have seen before”, signalling how our civilization has met its extinction, and the Great Blackout begins.
Recommended and a strong International Booker contender.
The Book of All Loves (2024) is translated by Thomas Bunstead, a writer in his own right as well as translator of Juan José Millás, Maria Gainza, Enrique Avila-Matis and others as well as author of a trilogy of novels inspired by a punk song.
This is a fascinatingly structured novel and one that would reward multiple reads as noted by Claire Oshetsky in her blurb.
The novel comes in two alternating sections.
The first (in order of appearance in the novel although later temporally) is set in a transformed world after the Great Blackout, a cataclysmic event, marked by fire and rain, that seems to have wiped out all but two of the human race, two lovers, a woman and man referred to simply as she and he. The repeated references in their conversation of a “the first bird that came and landed on our windowsill after the Great Blackout” gives this a Noah’s Ark feel (though there the bird's were released) although when we discover later the new names by which they call each other it comes from rather earlier in Genesis.
This part of the novel, in turn, consists of two alternating voices.
a) Aprohistic exchanges between the two on their love in this new world.
After the Great Blackout, our hair suddenly turned white. Like the snow on these mountains, which fell one morning and has never gone away.
– she says.
Even polar bear fur isn’t white. If you look at each hair closely, one at a time, you’ll see that it’s transparent.
– he says.
That’s all we get of their lives - a dystopian world-building story this isn’t.
b) entries from an encyclopaedia of different aspects of love (presumably the titular Book of All Loves). These draw on different aspects of science and culture, although often making rather sweeping and questionable assertions (a Wiki novel this also isn’t):
The Vikings, voyaging to the Mediterranean from their frozen northern seas, did not do so hugging the coasts of what we nowadays call Europe. Rather they crossed the continent along the Rhine and other watercourses, skilfully connecting one to the next; navigating fresh water to join two bodies of salt water via the shortest possible route: a kind of cultural geodesic. Along the way they burned towns, animals and the land itself, plundering anything of value – but leaving the flowers on the waysides and, in the cases where they were embroidered, the drapery in people’s houses too. It was not that they disliked these things, but that they were invisible to them – the Viking eye untrained for detecting that class of object. Nor did they plunder the beaches themselves when they arrived in what is now Italy; the grains of sand were so smooth, so spherical and gleaming that they did not even see them. What kind of shortest-line-between-two-points is this, then, that ‘does not see things’? The birds migrating to this continent in the present day also bear in their sexual organs a layer of stamens and ancient minerals that they cannot see and yet scatter as they go.(Geodesic love)
The second section is set, immediately pre the Great Blackout, in Venice, a city chosen by the author as the birthplace of capitalism and hence a fitting place to witness its dramatic end:
The writer taps away, as we've said, there is a nervous energy to her striking of the typewriter's keys, she has barely slept in days, the snow globe on the desk shakes, making it snow in the miniature version ofthe city whose canals Lord Byron boasted of having swum in winter, the city that was the birthplace of the butcher who in later centuries would be Charles Manson's inspiration, whose prisons Giacomo Casanova escaped and in whose waters Richard Wagner drowned, the city where the first bank cheque was signed and capitalism invented...
The couple in this section came to the city on holiday, renting a floor of a palazzo, some months earlier. But he decided, after something of a crisis of confidence, to stay in the city, working on a Latin translation project, one possibly connnected to the start of some strange happenings in Venice:
On the way back, snow began to fall, and they tried to go through St Mark's Square but found it had been cordoned off: although nobody could explain why, it appeared that a great bubble of total soundlessness had installed itself in that part ofthe city. 'When you enter the square, all sound disappears,' said the policeman at the cordon, who was wearing a camouflage face mask, 'it's as though your ears have been emptied out, it's never happened anywhere before, no one knows of anything like it — plus, as well as this total lack of sound, anyone who goes out into the middle gets an intense migraine.
She, however, went back to Montevideo, but has now, at the time this section is set, returned to the city, itself largely deserted, other than for blind and lost people, as the bubble of soundless have spread and robbed people of other senses. While she writes on her typewriter the entries on love that we are reading in the first section, the two are approached by their landlord, a mysterious man who styles himself The Ambassador, and who wants to prepare them for their role as the chosen one to build a new world, a world where love will be restored.
These sections have the mysterious atmosphere of a Hitchcock or a David Lynch film. An Alexa in their apartment, sent specially by The Ambassador, haunts them with its blinking blue light. The writer asks her erudite husband the origins of the name:
After a few moments' thought, and also speaking very quietly, he said: 'It's an abbreviation of Alexandra a Greek name that means protectress of humanity' She was about to say something else, but understood that his slow response had been because he was falling asleep — she knew he didn't want for knowledge in dead languages — as demonstrated by the successive snores that followed.
She curled up into a ball under the sheets and thought what Alexa would be making of these shapeless sounds issuing from some place in her husband's throat. The next day, as soon as they were woken by the sunlight breaking through the blinds, they shared an unusually long, deep kiss, and, as though he had spent the night considering her question, the first thing he said when they broke off was, 'I should also say that the great Greek poem recounting the end of the world is called Alexandra, Lycophron wrote it and it gives a complete account of Greece's history, from Troy to the Roman conquest, an entire civilization hurtling towards extinction.'
And the novel ends powerfully as their Alexa “begins to emit a sound, a powerful moan; her ring of blue light pulses in way neither of them have seen before”, signalling how our civilization has met its extinction, and the Great Blackout begins.
Recommended and a strong International Booker contender.
May 24, 2025
‘But, above all, the origins of wood and silence go back to the origins of humanity too: raw material for the wheel and fire, which are things that, every time they are used, do make the noise of a new love, a previously unheard chord.’
A lot to ‘love’ in this one, but I would have ‘loved’ it more without the ‘Venice’ chapters — those were just not to my taste at all (not badly written, just not to my liking whatsoever). The short(er) more concise chunks that have been arranged/composed almost like screenshot-ed conversations, or (somewhat bizarre) explosive aphorisms; or even haphazard poems were by far and certainly my favourites. And anyway because of how it’s structured, it’s actually a very easy and fast one to get through. Quick and fast but not without substance. The kind of text that makes one want to reread as soon as you’re done with it (or maybe just the highlighted bits, for me anyway).
‘Plants - which are death sounding in the air or a notebook for the writing down of impossible dreams - left to exercise their capricious geometry, would devastate the land while trying to access a future state as carbon stars. Vagabond fractals are plants, a soft layer that will cover over things and give rise not only to a new landscape but to a kind of nature that has never been seen before. Fire, once it has passed through a place, or snow, after it has fallen, leave behind a formless and still-to-be constructed world, ready to be inaugurated by footsteps - and it is not Adam or Eve, but the tracks of birds that are then the first thing to appear. So it is with plants as well, when the layer they create tastes as sweet to us as the first breast touched by the lips - brief as roses of a newborn. (The future of plants love)’
Mallo's work reminds me of Bluets by Maggie Nelson actually (perhaps just/mostly stylistically), which I do ‘remember’ liking and enjoying very much of when I first read it (but it’s been years so to be fair I wouldn’t rely on dirty, dusty nostalgia to vouch for anything). But in any case, I think if you’re into Nelson’s kind-of-sort-of poetry and/or poetic prose, chances are you’ll be into Mallo’s writing as well. If it had not been for the ‘Venice’ chapters/chunks, I would’ve very certainly given this a higher rating — might even say a four and half, very nearly five. But alas I absolutely do not ‘vibe’ with the ‘Venice’ bits.
‘The Iranian poet Mohsen Emadi has written these two lines: 'Nobody remembers their birth/nobody comes back from death’—Augustine of Hippo stated that once dead we have no idea what our death was like: death is a moment after which we are no longer in death but after death, and therefore from that other side we can no longer see what was previously experienced. So, after death and as was the case when we were very small, we exist once more only in other people's memories, a personal history that is no longer personal. The strangest part being that it is in these two unknown poles of our lives that people most often tell us they love us. (Polar love)’
And to conclude, I would just like to say that it is very funny to me to read reviews of readers who have picked this up thinking it’s some sort of ‘romance’, ‘pop romance’ book, and then being sorely disappointed. I, on the other hand, am happily surprised about the misleading title. All in all, I’m rather glad to have read this (and in advance as well, so thank you Fitzcarraldo Editions; do ‘love’ you quite a bit, but would ‘love’ you even more if you put the translators’ names on the book covers, really, would be so nice and ‘lovely’), and I look forward to reading the rest of Mallo’s work/writing — especially Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy.
‘Blue is one of the colours that the brain takes the longest to identify; most four-year-olds have not yet conceptualised it. The reason for this is simply how rarely blue features in nature. The sea, seen as a whole, is blue, but there is nothing blue about a cup of seawater. The same goes for the sky: a portion of air held between our hands is never blue. The fact that when we look down on the Earth from a space station and are able to say that we live on a blue planet and not on a green, grey, pink or brown planet, indicates that, seen on a large scale, the Earth's enveloping shade - that is, the statistical median of all terrestrial colours, combined with the different atmospheric densities gives a result that when looked at on a small scale becomes invisible, does not exist. This is a genuine 'apparition' of a colour as a result of the interaction of sunlight and the Earth's atmosphere. From which we can say that the branch of mathematics called Statistics is the most fantastical and at the same time the most realistic version of reality—When a large mass of people gather together at a football match — (Blue love)’
‘You and I are nothing.
he says.
In a world whose only desire is to devour everything, it's better to be nothing.
she says.’
March 11, 2024
29th book of 2024.
Mallo’s newest translation is a blend between his Nocilla Trilogy and his magnum opus, The Things We’ve Seen. This is the fifth novel of his I’ve read and I’ve come to agree with Chris Power who said, ‘There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you’ll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolaño another. Agustín Fernández Mallo has become one, too.’
And a lot of his power is at times imperceptible. The Book of All Loves is comprised of tiny conversation fragments (mostly abstract) and ‘types’ of love. Not your regular ideas of love, though. As the blurb says, they go ‘beyond the realm of relationships and into metaphysics, geology, linguistics, AI.’
As with his previous novels, Mallo’s occupation as a physicist as well as a writer means his narratives, his word choices and above all, his similes and metaphors, are so grounded in the cosmos, in giant universe-sized ideas. After reading through these bizarre ideas of love for 40 pages, we hit ‘Venice (I)’, where we go back before the ‘Great Blackout’ where the present day of the novel is set, and find a couple in Venice.
Mallo seems to build so much of his novel on images and recurring motifs, eventually colliding in strange and unpredictable ways. The recurring images here are the grooves in all things living and dead, a frozen leopard like in the Hemingway short story, a man in a blue suit, the curvature of a plane’s wing, Alexa, a ball made of vinyl records…
I was going to give it three-stars initially, because the long descriptions of metaphysical love, rarely seeming to connect to the everyday love of reality/human existence, and the strange ambling flashbacks in Venice, with the strange man, the feelings of forebodings, all came together a little jumbled. But, like with Bolaño, in the end I felt desolate, a little nervous, and unsure about what it all meant. That is the most exciting fiction to me. I love it when I finish a book and I feel unsure, unsettled, a little lost. It’s a horrible paradox: to read feeling frustrated, confused, even bored at times, and then to finish and feel all these emotions, but not know why! I was in the Palace Gardens just before going to work on my morning walk, under the trees, alive with birdsongs, when I finished and kept standing there for a moment trying to collect my thoughts. They’re still scattered.
Mallo’s newest translation is a blend between his Nocilla Trilogy and his magnum opus, The Things We’ve Seen. This is the fifth novel of his I’ve read and I’ve come to agree with Chris Power who said, ‘There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you’ll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolaño another. Agustín Fernández Mallo has become one, too.’
And a lot of his power is at times imperceptible. The Book of All Loves is comprised of tiny conversation fragments (mostly abstract) and ‘types’ of love. Not your regular ideas of love, though. As the blurb says, they go ‘beyond the realm of relationships and into metaphysics, geology, linguistics, AI.’
The idea of a city empty of humans and abandoned to the elements is a long-standing feature of a wide range of mythologies. Couples build real cities — out of physical matter, out of their affection, out of singular, unrepeatable customs and rituals: a language of their own. The peculiarity of this universe they create is that it isn’t destroyed if they split up, but simply enters the condition of abandoned city, of a ruin consigned to run its course in some unspecified place. We do not know the exact mutations this city space undergoes, nor what form it ultimately takes, but what is certain is that, disconnected forever from all that is known, it is an emotional destination that nobody can ever go back to. Not even the people who built it — the former lovers — will get to walk its streets again. The city therefore becomes a literal utopia, the only true utopia there is, such is the disconnectedness but also the violence of his presence. And these things also mean that not even the present day political dispensation, which as we know yearns for utopias and yet always ends up bringing about dystopias instead, dares go anywhere near it. And it is then, in this abandoned city, that the possibility arises for those of us on the other side to imagine — to idealise — an eternal kind of love: the so-called romantic love that enthusiasts for impossible experiences have been cultivating for centuries, with no little success. But romantic love is not the only option. We can look at it in the following way: if it is true that information is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed, it is also possible to thin of this world created by the lovers, and now disconnected from our own, as a piece of lost information, a kind of information-love that we try in vain to recover on a daily basis. It is a disquieting thing to imagine this city of love, left alone, mutating, taking on new forms, adrift somewhere in the universe, but, at the same time, some gap must exist through which to introduce oneself, if only for brief seconds, to experience in real time the material and emotional information that, with nothing controlling it and as in a distorted mirror of what we once were, still reflects us in its streets. The key question, the one to undo what until now has been an unresolvable knot, would be the following: if in this city of lost love everything is information, what word will it bring? (Information love)
The Iranian poet Mohsen Emadi has written these two lines: 'Nobody remembers their birth/nobody comes back from death’—Augustine of Hippo stated that once dead we have no idea what our death was like: death is a moment after which we are no longer in death but after death, and therefore from that other side we can no longer see what was previously experienced. So, after death and as was the case when we were very small, we exist once more only in other people's memories, a personal history that is no longer personal. The strangest part being that it is in these two unknown poles of our lives that people most often tell us they love us. (Polar love)
As with his previous novels, Mallo’s occupation as a physicist as well as a writer means his narratives, his word choices and above all, his similes and metaphors, are so grounded in the cosmos, in giant universe-sized ideas. After reading through these bizarre ideas of love for 40 pages, we hit ‘Venice (I)’, where we go back before the ‘Great Blackout’ where the present day of the novel is set, and find a couple in Venice.
Mallo seems to build so much of his novel on images and recurring motifs, eventually colliding in strange and unpredictable ways. The recurring images here are the grooves in all things living and dead, a frozen leopard like in the Hemingway short story, a man in a blue suit, the curvature of a plane’s wing, Alexa, a ball made of vinyl records…
I was going to give it three-stars initially, because the long descriptions of metaphysical love, rarely seeming to connect to the everyday love of reality/human existence, and the strange ambling flashbacks in Venice, with the strange man, the feelings of forebodings, all came together a little jumbled. But, like with Bolaño, in the end I felt desolate, a little nervous, and unsure about what it all meant. That is the most exciting fiction to me. I love it when I finish a book and I feel unsure, unsettled, a little lost. It’s a horrible paradox: to read feeling frustrated, confused, even bored at times, and then to finish and feel all these emotions, but not know why! I was in the Palace Gardens just before going to work on my morning walk, under the trees, alive with birdsongs, when I finished and kept standing there for a moment trying to collect my thoughts. They’re still scattered.
February 7, 2024
This was a really strange book and I did enjoy the writing and poetic parts of it but it was super confusing and a bit too experimental for me to fully engage.
The premise of this book is that there has been a catastrophic event called The Great Blackout which has led there to be only one man and woman on Earth who are in love with each other. Part of the novel is filled with conversations they have with each other interjected with a bit list of different types of love (not the usual types we have heard of but really poetic and off-the-wall sort of types of love). The other half the book follows the couple before the blackout in Venice on a trip, in a stream of consciousness style of narration in speaks about who they meet and the sorts of things they do on the trip.
I preferred the sections after the blackout a lot more than the Venice sections. However I don't think it's a super accessible novel just because of how weirdly it's written. It has a premise but no plot and is quite challenging in that you need to actively keep going with reading the book and getting through each section. Despite this I found myself really enjoying the writing style and thought many parts of it were really poetic and beautiful, especially the sections of some of the descriptions of love which had such intense and creative imagery.
Not sure who I would recommend this to or what this book is setting out to achieve, or even how I feel after finishing it, but it was definitely a unique experience and a book I will remember for it's ingenuity.
The premise of this book is that there has been a catastrophic event called The Great Blackout which has led there to be only one man and woman on Earth who are in love with each other. Part of the novel is filled with conversations they have with each other interjected with a bit list of different types of love (not the usual types we have heard of but really poetic and off-the-wall sort of types of love). The other half the book follows the couple before the blackout in Venice on a trip, in a stream of consciousness style of narration in speaks about who they meet and the sorts of things they do on the trip.
I preferred the sections after the blackout a lot more than the Venice sections. However I don't think it's a super accessible novel just because of how weirdly it's written. It has a premise but no plot and is quite challenging in that you need to actively keep going with reading the book and getting through each section. Despite this I found myself really enjoying the writing style and thought many parts of it were really poetic and beautiful, especially the sections of some of the descriptions of love which had such intense and creative imagery.
Not sure who I would recommend this to or what this book is setting out to achieve, or even how I feel after finishing it, but it was definitely a unique experience and a book I will remember for it's ingenuity.
January 8, 2025
A worthy, if not easy, end of the year book. In lyrical, almost poetry-like prose, love is examined in the relationship of two unnamed Uruguayans who settled down in an increasingly depopulated Venice
Love is the loss of one’s own voice with no possibility of it being reinvented as something called power. (Unrecordable love).
For a short book The Book of All Loves is both wildly ambitious and at times quite hard to progress in. In 4 sections, we get epitaph like pronouncements on the nature of various kinds of love, containing gems of writing like:
But love, in any of its manifestations, is far more difficult to represent than anything that has been experienced; the effort required to bring love into the ambit of fiction, and to make it credible, is almost infinite. In order for love onscreen, or in a book or onstage to attain optimal verisimilitude, you need very long build-ups, and to walk genuine labyrinths that include unexpected details; only then will the appearance of love truly come off for spectator or reader. The reason for this is simply its being the principal ingredient in survival. Love is not a gesture, nor is it a situation or a structure, nor far less a poem or a fiction. Love does not resemble anything; love is a monster. (Monster love)
These are interspersed by dialogs between a he and she in a pristine valley, where love and sex are celebrated after The Great Blackout, implying a futuristic narrative, but strangely the writing reminded me more of The Prophet of Kahlil Gibran. An example that show the poetic nature of these dialogues is included below:
Sometimes, when it starts to grow light in the valley and you’re still asleep and the early morning sunlight through the window begins to shine on your body, it’s like my eyes have never seen you before, like you’ve come into being simultaneously with the morning. Then I don’t know what you’re dreaming about, and I start to panic at the possibility I won’t recognize you when you wake.
– she says.
Your face, like water and like uranium, like birds and houseplants, like the sun’s corona and like writing, already existed before you were born. Your face has been among humans always. That was why I recognized you the moment I saw you.
And then, most like regular prose, we have at 20% of the book a shift to Venice and an Uruguayan writer and her husband. They have an Alexa in a palazzo in Venice, I am sure this is commentary on mass tourism and surveillance capitalism but this section just worked less for me.
Also an ambassador like man shows up frequently while her husband knows everything about Latin, and unexplained sound vacuum (and propagating no smell as well) keeps St Marks square, and increasingly large parts of Venice inaccessible and rendering people blind.
And then we have some leopard frozen on a mountain glacier, like The Snows of Kilimanjaro of Ernest Hemingway, but then situated in the Atlas Mountains.
Meanwhile dreams come true and vinyl recordings are implied to contain the entire world. Still these Venice sections in my view were weaker within the overall context of the book.
Still, a mesmerising and deeply fascinating book, and I am sure to read more by the author!
Quotes, so many, really the writing (and translation!) is excellent:
The first time I touched you it was like coming home. A home I’d never been in before.
– he says.
Since being with you, I’ve lost my fear of routine.
– she says.
You and I are nothing.
– he says.
In a world whose only desire is to devour everything, it’s better to be nothing.
– she says.
Falling in love consists of allowing someone to install you inside their head and, once they have you there, trapped forever in their dreams, to do with you as they please; from that moment on you will become a mobile archive inside their body.
After so many years lying down together in the same bed, in the same posture, emitting the same bodily sounds, I’ve come to think that I don’t exist, that the repetition makes me dead to you.
– he says.
If only. The dead person never dies again, they’re eternal.
– she says.
We are all souvenirs of an idea, of a perversion, of a nation, of a person, of whatever it might be; we do not possess souvenirs, they possess us.
Every night, while you sleep, your eyelids are the sluice gates of a river that stop me from swimming back up your body, from entering you. Outside, meanwhile, the valley awaits the sun in darkness, and I spend the time thinking of its perpetual snow and of the nameless birds who in that moment will be cutting through the air above it. At times, this sort of mineral silence gives rise to a noise that excavates the darkness, leaving it not only shorn of its silence but riddled, hollow.
– she says.
Hollow space filled with fears and solitude, hollow space for all the surplus, the overspill, the remainders. Noise is only music we don’t yet understand.
– he says.
Nothing exists until it has been named.
Here, there and in every place, there exists the belief that to create something is to possess it – as shown by the omnipresence of copyright. From there it is only one step to believing that knowing something also means possessing it. The Enlightenment and its ambassadors, on a multitude of expeditions across the seas, studied and classified thousands of examples of shrubs, trees, animals and flowers. This knowledge, strictly scientific and ideologically founded, also generated the idea that the territory being studied was a legitimate possession. ‘The Earth belongs to those who study it’ is no more than the enlightened transposition of that other motto of the peasant revolution, ‘the Earth belongs to those who work it’. Such magical leaps in the possession of things are present also in love when it manifests in the belief, very widespread, that to love is to know the other. (Possession love)
The Iranian poet Mohsen Emadi has written these two lines: ‘Nobody remembers their birth / nobody comes back from death.’ We could interpret the first as saying that nobody remembers their birth because, indeed, until we are approximately three years old we do not have any memories; our memory of this part of our life is, to put it one way, poured into other people’s memories, the memories of those who saw us and who now tell us what we were like. Then, over the years, everybody’s memories of themselves arrive, the memories that are properly our own and which consolidate you in the present moment and project you into a future. Until the end of your days, which is when the second line appears – ‘nobody comes back from death’ – which also merits some exploration. Augustine of Hippo stated that once dead, we have no idea what our death was like: death is a moment after which we are no longer in death but after death, and therefore from that other side we can no longer see what was previously experienced. So, after death – and as was the case when we were very small – we exist once more only in other people’s memories, a personal history that is no longer personal. The strangest part being that it is in these two unknown poles of our lives that people most often tell us they love us. (Polar love)
All the snow in the world is already in the sea.
– she says.
The past is the only part of life that remains. The past is holy. Every person is a sacred shape, a walking altar.
– she says.
The solution to a problem necessarily grows out of the seed of that problem – a solution that will later be a problem, and so on, successively. This is not open to question. (Non-homeopathic love)
Fiction does not hide things; on the contrary, it allows them to emerge as they truly are.
To love someone is to admit that there is also something in them that frightens you.
– she says.
Love is the loss of one’s own voice with no possibility of it being reinvented as something called power. (Unrecordable love).
For a short book The Book of All Loves is both wildly ambitious and at times quite hard to progress in. In 4 sections, we get epitaph like pronouncements on the nature of various kinds of love, containing gems of writing like:
But love, in any of its manifestations, is far more difficult to represent than anything that has been experienced; the effort required to bring love into the ambit of fiction, and to make it credible, is almost infinite. In order for love onscreen, or in a book or onstage to attain optimal verisimilitude, you need very long build-ups, and to walk genuine labyrinths that include unexpected details; only then will the appearance of love truly come off for spectator or reader. The reason for this is simply its being the principal ingredient in survival. Love is not a gesture, nor is it a situation or a structure, nor far less a poem or a fiction. Love does not resemble anything; love is a monster. (Monster love)
These are interspersed by dialogs between a he and she in a pristine valley, where love and sex are celebrated after The Great Blackout, implying a futuristic narrative, but strangely the writing reminded me more of The Prophet of Kahlil Gibran. An example that show the poetic nature of these dialogues is included below:
Sometimes, when it starts to grow light in the valley and you’re still asleep and the early morning sunlight through the window begins to shine on your body, it’s like my eyes have never seen you before, like you’ve come into being simultaneously with the morning. Then I don’t know what you’re dreaming about, and I start to panic at the possibility I won’t recognize you when you wake.
– she says.
Your face, like water and like uranium, like birds and houseplants, like the sun’s corona and like writing, already existed before you were born. Your face has been among humans always. That was why I recognized you the moment I saw you.
And then, most like regular prose, we have at 20% of the book a shift to Venice and an Uruguayan writer and her husband. They have an Alexa in a palazzo in Venice, I am sure this is commentary on mass tourism and surveillance capitalism but this section just worked less for me.
Also an ambassador like man shows up frequently while her husband knows everything about Latin, and unexplained sound vacuum (and propagating no smell as well) keeps St Marks square, and increasingly large parts of Venice inaccessible and rendering people blind.
And then we have some leopard frozen on a mountain glacier, like The Snows of Kilimanjaro of Ernest Hemingway, but then situated in the Atlas Mountains.
Meanwhile dreams come true and vinyl recordings are implied to contain the entire world. Still these Venice sections in my view were weaker within the overall context of the book.
Still, a mesmerising and deeply fascinating book, and I am sure to read more by the author!
Quotes, so many, really the writing (and translation!) is excellent:
The first time I touched you it was like coming home. A home I’d never been in before.
– he says.
Since being with you, I’ve lost my fear of routine.
– she says.
You and I are nothing.
– he says.
In a world whose only desire is to devour everything, it’s better to be nothing.
– she says.
Falling in love consists of allowing someone to install you inside their head and, once they have you there, trapped forever in their dreams, to do with you as they please; from that moment on you will become a mobile archive inside their body.
After so many years lying down together in the same bed, in the same posture, emitting the same bodily sounds, I’ve come to think that I don’t exist, that the repetition makes me dead to you.
– he says.
If only. The dead person never dies again, they’re eternal.
– she says.
We are all souvenirs of an idea, of a perversion, of a nation, of a person, of whatever it might be; we do not possess souvenirs, they possess us.
Every night, while you sleep, your eyelids are the sluice gates of a river that stop me from swimming back up your body, from entering you. Outside, meanwhile, the valley awaits the sun in darkness, and I spend the time thinking of its perpetual snow and of the nameless birds who in that moment will be cutting through the air above it. At times, this sort of mineral silence gives rise to a noise that excavates the darkness, leaving it not only shorn of its silence but riddled, hollow.
– she says.
Hollow space filled with fears and solitude, hollow space for all the surplus, the overspill, the remainders. Noise is only music we don’t yet understand.
– he says.
Nothing exists until it has been named.
Here, there and in every place, there exists the belief that to create something is to possess it – as shown by the omnipresence of copyright. From there it is only one step to believing that knowing something also means possessing it. The Enlightenment and its ambassadors, on a multitude of expeditions across the seas, studied and classified thousands of examples of shrubs, trees, animals and flowers. This knowledge, strictly scientific and ideologically founded, also generated the idea that the territory being studied was a legitimate possession. ‘The Earth belongs to those who study it’ is no more than the enlightened transposition of that other motto of the peasant revolution, ‘the Earth belongs to those who work it’. Such magical leaps in the possession of things are present also in love when it manifests in the belief, very widespread, that to love is to know the other. (Possession love)
The Iranian poet Mohsen Emadi has written these two lines: ‘Nobody remembers their birth / nobody comes back from death.’ We could interpret the first as saying that nobody remembers their birth because, indeed, until we are approximately three years old we do not have any memories; our memory of this part of our life is, to put it one way, poured into other people’s memories, the memories of those who saw us and who now tell us what we were like. Then, over the years, everybody’s memories of themselves arrive, the memories that are properly our own and which consolidate you in the present moment and project you into a future. Until the end of your days, which is when the second line appears – ‘nobody comes back from death’ – which also merits some exploration. Augustine of Hippo stated that once dead, we have no idea what our death was like: death is a moment after which we are no longer in death but after death, and therefore from that other side we can no longer see what was previously experienced. So, after death – and as was the case when we were very small – we exist once more only in other people’s memories, a personal history that is no longer personal. The strangest part being that it is in these two unknown poles of our lives that people most often tell us they love us. (Polar love)
All the snow in the world is already in the sea.
– she says.
The past is the only part of life that remains. The past is holy. Every person is a sacred shape, a walking altar.
– she says.
The solution to a problem necessarily grows out of the seed of that problem – a solution that will later be a problem, and so on, successively. This is not open to question. (Non-homeopathic love)
Fiction does not hide things; on the contrary, it allows them to emerge as they truly are.
To love someone is to admit that there is also something in them that frightens you.
– she says.
June 5, 2022
A lo mejor soy demasiado lerda para verle el encanto, pero me ha parecido que los conceptos que plantea se acaban perdiendo en el estilo poético, cuyo valor estético reconozco, pero sigue sin ser de mi gusto.
Tiene una manera un tanto retorcida y fría, quizás científica, de expresar conceptos que en realidad son bastante sencillos, y de complicar los que de por sí son complejos. Así pues, le doy la razón a los que ensalzan su estilo particular de narrar, y le aplaudo la experimentación a la que somete su escritura.
Hay momentos de súbita belleza («El amor aparece cuando distraídamente y sin pudor pisamos otra alma y no se queja»; «Las llamas huyen de tu cuerpo, no porque no seas de carne y hueso, sino porque vives en la orilla mismo del tiempo»; «Tienes tanto poder que podrías colgar tus ropas en ese rayo de luna que entra por la ventana»), pero, definitivamente, no los suficientes para hacerme olvidar la inmensa pretensión que exuda este libro.
Tiene una manera un tanto retorcida y fría, quizás científica, de expresar conceptos que en realidad son bastante sencillos, y de complicar los que de por sí son complejos. Así pues, le doy la razón a los que ensalzan su estilo particular de narrar, y le aplaudo la experimentación a la que somete su escritura.
Hay momentos de súbita belleza («El amor aparece cuando distraídamente y sin pudor pisamos otra alma y no se queja»; «Las llamas huyen de tu cuerpo, no porque no seas de carne y hueso, sino porque vives en la orilla mismo del tiempo»; «Tienes tanto poder que podrías colgar tus ropas en ese rayo de luna que entra por la ventana»), pero, definitivamente, no los suficientes para hacerme olvidar la inmensa pretensión que exuda este libro.
Read
September 9, 2022Uno de los libros más insólitos que he leído en mucho tiempo, tan desconcertante y a la vez iluminador como un relámpago.
Agustín Fernández Mallo desarrolla metódica y libérrimamente una amalgama de ficción antirrealista (¿suprarrealista?), diálogos poéticos y ensayo filosófico, con ecos de autores dispares como DeLillo, Saramago o Kundera, pasajes de una intensidad abrumadora, saltos mortales (sin red), intuiciones crípticas y la sabiduría omnicomprensiva y burlona de un dios travieso. Manténgase alejado de lectores con gustos convencionales.
Agustín Fernández Mallo desarrolla metódica y libérrimamente una amalgama de ficción antirrealista (¿suprarrealista?), diálogos poéticos y ensayo filosófico, con ecos de autores dispares como DeLillo, Saramago o Kundera, pasajes de una intensidad abrumadora, saltos mortales (sin red), intuiciones crípticas y la sabiduría omnicomprensiva y burlona de un dios travieso. Manténgase alejado de lectores con gustos convencionales.
May 30, 2022
pienso en el monte ararat y en venezia. dos lugares que, a priori, podrían no tener nada en común. también en el kilimanjaro y la akropolis, en el ángel caído y en que amor es roma al revés, que todos los caminos conducen a ella y a él.
.
alguien me contó una vez que en venezia, en uno de los capiteles de la basílica de san marcos es imposible mantenerte en pie sin perder el equilibrio. supongo que será por eso de que continuamente se está hundiendo, venezia, como una gran piscina en la que a ratos no haces pie. como la venezia que crea #agustinfernandezmallo para crear un nuevo apocalipsis, el Gran Apagón, con mayúsculas. Una pareja, escritora ella y profesor de latin él, vuelan hasta venezia para pasar unos días de descanso pero ni se imaginan todo el proceso que está a punto de desencadenarse y que está vinculado al agua de una pila bautismal . sin diques de contención #agustinfernandezmallo crea una nueva arca de noe para poder salvar aquello que es vital para la humanidad: el amor. y para ello blinda la plaza de san marcos convirtiéndola en un espacio cero donde sólo vuela el pajaro sin nombre. lo que no sabemos es si traerá tan buenas noticias como la paloma que alegró a noe.
#ellibrodetodoslosamores es una amalgama muy bien estructurada, postmodernista de un clásico tan manido que ya ni sabemos descifrarlo... ¿acaso seríamos capaces de definir qué es el amor en pleno siglo XXI? ¿para qué sirve el amor? si es que sirve para algo claro... ¿quién lo creó?, ¿se puede destruir? y cuando digo destruir quiero decir hacerlo desaparecer... hay que despojar al amor de todos sus ropajes como hizo juan ramón jiménez con su poesía para poder verlo limpio, tal y como es... ¿tenemos todos acceso al amor? ¿y dónde vive? ¿dentro de cada uno o está en el aire, como dice la canción, y resulta ser un virus que exterminará a la humanidad? ¿es el amor el primer lenguaje, la primera forma de comunicación que tuvo la humanidad? todas estas preguntas que me hago yo y muchas más trata de dar respuesta #agustinfernandezmallo fábulando con la posibilidad de volver al origen de todo, esta vez, desde venezia y un montón de vinilos.
Quizás, para salvarse, lo mejor sea ir hacia la colisión o hacia el amor.
.
Ella le dijo :
Un cuerpo no sobrevive en un lugar si no es tan elástico como ese lugar.
Él le dijo:
Hoy busco en ti la más curva de todas las rectas.
.
alguien me contó una vez que en venezia, en uno de los capiteles de la basílica de san marcos es imposible mantenerte en pie sin perder el equilibrio. supongo que será por eso de que continuamente se está hundiendo, venezia, como una gran piscina en la que a ratos no haces pie. como la venezia que crea #agustinfernandezmallo para crear un nuevo apocalipsis, el Gran Apagón, con mayúsculas. Una pareja, escritora ella y profesor de latin él, vuelan hasta venezia para pasar unos días de descanso pero ni se imaginan todo el proceso que está a punto de desencadenarse y que está vinculado al agua de una pila bautismal . sin diques de contención #agustinfernandezmallo crea una nueva arca de noe para poder salvar aquello que es vital para la humanidad: el amor. y para ello blinda la plaza de san marcos convirtiéndola en un espacio cero donde sólo vuela el pajaro sin nombre. lo que no sabemos es si traerá tan buenas noticias como la paloma que alegró a noe.
#ellibrodetodoslosamores es una amalgama muy bien estructurada, postmodernista de un clásico tan manido que ya ni sabemos descifrarlo... ¿acaso seríamos capaces de definir qué es el amor en pleno siglo XXI? ¿para qué sirve el amor? si es que sirve para algo claro... ¿quién lo creó?, ¿se puede destruir? y cuando digo destruir quiero decir hacerlo desaparecer... hay que despojar al amor de todos sus ropajes como hizo juan ramón jiménez con su poesía para poder verlo limpio, tal y como es... ¿tenemos todos acceso al amor? ¿y dónde vive? ¿dentro de cada uno o está en el aire, como dice la canción, y resulta ser un virus que exterminará a la humanidad? ¿es el amor el primer lenguaje, la primera forma de comunicación que tuvo la humanidad? todas estas preguntas que me hago yo y muchas más trata de dar respuesta #agustinfernandezmallo fábulando con la posibilidad de volver al origen de todo, esta vez, desde venezia y un montón de vinilos.
Quizás, para salvarse, lo mejor sea ir hacia la colisión o hacia el amor.
.
Ella le dijo :
Un cuerpo no sobrevive en un lugar si no es tan elástico como ese lugar.
Él le dijo:
Hoy busco en ti la más curva de todas las rectas.
May 4, 2024
a love letter to writing and its ability to invoke pure emotion. i was repeatedly stunned by the sheer beauty that mallo writes with (though this should also be attributed in part to a fantastic translation by bunstead) and the surreal poetry woven into the work. the alternating narratives were enacted perfectly, each compelling in their own right; the representation of love in the ordinary was beautifully composed. this was a book of immaculate grace and one i think will affect me throughout my life - i cannot recommend this book enough.
‘in your absence, i have not stopped thinking about you. at no moment has the image of you left me. you are the totality of all that i know.’
‘in your absence, i have not stopped thinking about you. at no moment has the image of you left me. you are the totality of all that i know.’
May 5, 2024
An extraordinary book for its mix of simplicity and complexity, and for keeping you waiting until the very last pages to fully understand what is happening.
This feels like two different stories. One is very formulaic – two pieces one of which ‘he says and the other ‘she says’. The story of two lovers and their (often intimate) responses to each other. Here are two separate examples:
I can’t get along with the idea of a book speaking, of the person reading it being able to hear it inside themselves. A book is a mute thing, it’s the silence of the forest converted into another forest of silence. In all the years in this valley, I haven’t read a single book.
- she says.
Yes, you have: the longest and most arcane book ever written, sex between us. Undergrowth that stirs with no wind every sunrise. It speaks inside us.
- he says.
When I enter and exit the groove between your buttocks, my skin comes from another world.
- he says.
To love has nothing to do with looking up at the heavens and feeling stupefied by gods’ demands.
To love means looking down and using the tip of your tongue to write in the orifice of desire.
- she says.
Gradually you learn that they are living in the aftermath of some great extinction event called the Great Blackout. We never discover what this is, or if indeed they are the only survivors.
Around these joined responses are longer paragraphs which describe different types of love. Each of the paragraphs ends with the name for the type of love, for example Silence love, Delay love, Illness love, Fragmented love or even Fax love. There are thirty of these descriptions in the first 41 pages of the book. They can be both profound and beautiful. Here are some examples:
Dust, with all its smells, flavour and texture, is made of the union of excretions and silence. But, inside these new-made motes, there will again be silence, and more of it, a scandalous lack of sound that mysticism seeks to recycle and explain by inventing the presence of a mute, surreptitious god, a divinity that never speaks to us but nonetheless somehow demands that we explain ourselves. Any silence in a film, any white space separating the panels in a comic, any full stop followed by a new sentence on the page of a novel, the blank spaces on your credit card, and any time two lovers fall silent and look at one another and are suddenly lost for words, it is the terrain of – the living , direct vision of – one moment in the life of this surreptitious, unspeaking god. (Silence love)
Nothing exists until it has been named. Every epoch establishes its own concept of love and the way we feel and express it has come down to us from the Middle Ages; something called ‘courtly love’. It consists of projecting love in the absence of the feminine figure, a woman placed at such a distance that she can firstly be invoked by the written word, then verbally seduced and finally, following a winding path of programmatic misunderstandings, offer herself up to be penetrated in the carnal encounter. We repeat the same clichés as a 13th-century man or a 19th-century woman. Nietzsche said that even the most commonly used words are metaphors for other things, but are so well-worn that we have forgotten that fact. The same happens with love; repeated ad infinitum, every time it appears we think it to be absolutely original. Here is a first paradox: to love consists in choosing someone from among the millions of people on the planet, segregating that person in order to ascribe virtues to them that only you can see, contemplating a marvel where the rest of the planet sees only statistics and ordinariness, creating a unique human, but only then to apply that courtly love template to them, which in turn standardizes the beloved. Or at least this was still the case until recently. The kinds of negotiations required by friendships and love on social networks arise out of a skill set barely different from that required by a company to maintain and increase its profits. In that classical equation of courtly love, this is the result of exchanging the violence of the courtier of what is absolutely absent – that of the capitalist Homo economicus (Economicus love)
When two people get in a car, make themselves comfortable, put their seatbelts on and set off together on a long journey, they don’t usually say ‘have a good trip’. Same when two people set off together on a flight. When people get into bed, however, before turning out the lights , it’s not at all unusual for them to say ‘good night’, from which it would seem that sleeping means going somewhere completely separate from the world. Sleeping is a journey to a territory that nobody but the dreamer can set foot in; wishing one another good night therefore makes perfect sense. Hence the fact lover touch, kiss and penetrate one another while awake: a vain attempt to extract, experience and understand everything that in the night, in silence and with eyes closed, each one constructs in a place forever inaccessible to the other. (Journey love)
The suddenly the format changes and in the middle of a page we see VENICE (1) which is followed by 28 pages of prose describing a couple of visit Venice and live there is an apartment. The man is a professor of Latin and his wife is a writer. They are from Uruguay and after a few weeks the woman returns home while her husband remains in the city. The tone is very different of this section is very different and obviously before the Great Blackout. One description seems to foreshadow what might be about to come:
Over the days that followed, and perhaps because it had been pointed out to him, he too noticed blind people frequently crossing their path. That night, while he was watching television in the living room, she looked up from her book and said that the city was being taken over by the blind, that she was sure of it, and not the sort of blind people one used to get, but rather those who had lost their vision suddenly, so that they didn’t have time to access the special sensitivity that develops when one is blind from birth. This brought to mind an old story, the name of which escaped her, which she had read in a book by a French author, Boris Vian, nowadays virtually forgotten: ‘It Is about a city where, without the meteorologists having seen it coming, a dense fog moves in one day, so dense that the people in the city can see no more than a couple of centimetres ahead of them. At first, frightened both of the heavens and of their fellow humans, they go and huddle in the farthest, most hidden corners in their homes. It isn’t long, though, before they realise how little sense this makes: they’re no more hidden at the bottom of a deep home than they are out in the middle of the wide open spaces. The entire city is a continuous mass of milk-coloured cloud, which, in time, the people not only get used to, but causes them to lose all inhibitions. They start going out naked in the streets, helping themselves to whatever they want from shops without paying, they fornicate with the first person they bump into, that sort of thing. The happiness they experience is like the kind associated with the god Pan. Then one day, just like that, the fog clears. An unbearable feeling of shame takes hold of the people, followed by embarrassment at all the acts they’ve committed, and again they hide away thinking never to come out: some even take their own lives.
I always love these little books within a book. They send me off looking for the title and keen to explore works of unknown authors.
The second VENICE piece is 23 pages long and the returning woman meet a strange man on the flight back to Venice to be reunited with her husband. A third Venice section is only 11 pages and the final one, which brings the whole book to its conclusion, is only nine pages. I find these ever shortening pieces very compelling. The strange narrative is quite different to the rest of the book, but the contrast is at the same time very satisfying.
March 22, 2022
I see that some other people loved this book. I must be too stupid to understand because I thought it was arrant nonsense.
It seemed, to me, to be a book full of nicely constructed phrases randomly connected together. There was obviously a thread running through the book, basically separated into two styles, as the couple living in Venice, as the world around them collapses, get on with doing nothing at all. Every now and again, I'd think I'd found the key idea behind it all. But no, a bit more gobbledygook and it all slipped away from me again.
I have to admit that some of it was funny, especially the utter nonsense presented as fact, but I only ploughed through to the end because I'd paid for it.
It seemed, to me, to be a book full of nicely constructed phrases randomly connected together. There was obviously a thread running through the book, basically separated into two styles, as the couple living in Venice, as the world around them collapses, get on with doing nothing at all. Every now and again, I'd think I'd found the key idea behind it all. But no, a bit more gobbledygook and it all slipped away from me again.
I have to admit that some of it was funny, especially the utter nonsense presented as fact, but I only ploughed through to the end because I'd paid for it.
February 9, 2024
"Hence the fact lovers touch, kiss and penetrate one another while awake: a vain attempt to extract, experience and understand everything that in the night, in silence and with eyes closed, each one constructs in a place forever inaccessible to the other."
What is love? What power does it yield? Is it even a power feeling or sensation? What would love look like if we could all start over? What are the limits to love?
These are some of the many questions I thought about while reading Agustin Fernandez Mallo's amazing new book The Book of All Loves. And what better book for Valentine's Day than this allegory of post-modern love in this capitalistic wasteland.
Though we never really find out what exactly is the Great Blackout, the certainty is that it is coming and we have no power over it. Perhaps what is left is the Great Restart where we can amend our errors after having past the point of no return. Told in epistolary philosophical bits about various types of loves these metphysical passages are mixed with the story of a writer and her husband visiting Venice while she is working on her newest text. What ensues is such a beautiful balance of the sublime ephemeral and the hope of new beginnings.
There is so much to appreciate in this story; the layered language, the philosophy, the mix of fiction and non-fiction, the book within the book, and the accessibility and maneuverability of language. It is very difficult to sum up the meaning, or even the trajectory of Fernandez Mallo's latest story that navigates terrains of physics, language, geology, and anthropology. The Book of All Loves left me amazed as an experience to behold in a way that only the wonder that is Fernandez Mallo's writing could create. The Book of All Loves is no typical Valentine's Day book, though it is the perfect book to expect from Fernandez Mallo and Fitzcarraldo about the subject of love in our modern world.
"What is radical about the horizon is not that it can never be reached, but that it never stops moving."
"Another way of understanding things is to say that we come from a darkness and are moving towards another darkness. Between the two there is only a brief candle, a match pointlessly struck, although everyone's soul gets its corporate branding in the end."
"I've been lying next to it, observing it, receiving its warmth, at first as though it were yours, the warmth of you that I was missing, but then the sphere started to express itself and its heat came to be what I was looking for, this sphere is a star, wholly and entirely a star, the nucleus of love, which is what makes it expand and contract without ever exhausting it, a love that pulses and not only fills my days and nights but also my dreams; I don't know what I would do without it."
"In a world whose only desire is to devour everything, it's better to be nothing."
"The universe sacrifices itself in us."
"A lack of love, the lack of love that was afflicting the world then and still does now, that was the thing contaminating the baptismal water, a lack of love that not only affects the world but that is emptying it out, as though it were erasing it, and, well, in short, what I'm using these examples to say is that the fossil dimension is something that, after existing as a virtual latency, suddenly emerges, like your face, which seems very familiar to me, as though you and I have met before, as though your face came from some very far-off place in time, I don't know, do you know what I mean?"
"As with vinyl records, the world's objects all had surfaces marked by grooves and micro-grooves and you just had to find the right needle to extract their story, their particular and previously unheard story. [...] and that everybody at some point in their life played the involuntary role of being somebody else's needle."
"Nothing exists until it has been named. Every epoch establishes its own concept of things, and our concepts of love and the way we feel and express it has come down to us from the Middle Ages; something called "courtly love".
"Here is a first paradox. To love consists in choosing someone from among the millions of people on the planet, segregating that person in order to ascribe virtues to them that only you can see, contemplating a marvel where the rest of the planet sees only statistics and ordinariness, creating a unique human, but only then to apply that courtly love template to them, which in turn standardizes the beloved."
"What did you think would happen? We aren't Romeo and Juliet, we aren't a poem or a novel, only humans."
"The most banal things brush up against their environment - against life - in a way that creates a surprising sort of friction with fiction. In short, banal reality is always distinct from everything. But love, in any of its manifestations, is far more difficult to represent than anything that has been experienced; the effort required to bring love into the ambit of fiction, and to make it credible, is almost infinite."
"Our very kiss is a solar eclipse, so absorbent that it sucks up all the light in the world, leaving everything in darkness. It's the only way we know how to join our appetite in a single body. If you stare at the lightbulb in the bedroom when it's on, you also only see a dark point at its centre, so dark that you don't know what to call it. A point where the light absorbs itself."
"We die because in the moment we're born, something installs itself inside us that is not exactly death but resembles it too closely."
"There is a movement towards the bone that is missing from my ribs, towards birds that have lost their way, towards a desert of lies with walls erected around them. In the Beginning there was also the darkness of a womb, and then a cry and tears at the contact with light For this reason, tears and light are sisters."
What is love? What power does it yield? Is it even a power feeling or sensation? What would love look like if we could all start over? What are the limits to love?
These are some of the many questions I thought about while reading Agustin Fernandez Mallo's amazing new book The Book of All Loves. And what better book for Valentine's Day than this allegory of post-modern love in this capitalistic wasteland.
Though we never really find out what exactly is the Great Blackout, the certainty is that it is coming and we have no power over it. Perhaps what is left is the Great Restart where we can amend our errors after having past the point of no return. Told in epistolary philosophical bits about various types of loves these metphysical passages are mixed with the story of a writer and her husband visiting Venice while she is working on her newest text. What ensues is such a beautiful balance of the sublime ephemeral and the hope of new beginnings.
There is so much to appreciate in this story; the layered language, the philosophy, the mix of fiction and non-fiction, the book within the book, and the accessibility and maneuverability of language. It is very difficult to sum up the meaning, or even the trajectory of Fernandez Mallo's latest story that navigates terrains of physics, language, geology, and anthropology. The Book of All Loves left me amazed as an experience to behold in a way that only the wonder that is Fernandez Mallo's writing could create. The Book of All Loves is no typical Valentine's Day book, though it is the perfect book to expect from Fernandez Mallo and Fitzcarraldo about the subject of love in our modern world.
"What is radical about the horizon is not that it can never be reached, but that it never stops moving."
"Another way of understanding things is to say that we come from a darkness and are moving towards another darkness. Between the two there is only a brief candle, a match pointlessly struck, although everyone's soul gets its corporate branding in the end."
"I've been lying next to it, observing it, receiving its warmth, at first as though it were yours, the warmth of you that I was missing, but then the sphere started to express itself and its heat came to be what I was looking for, this sphere is a star, wholly and entirely a star, the nucleus of love, which is what makes it expand and contract without ever exhausting it, a love that pulses and not only fills my days and nights but also my dreams; I don't know what I would do without it."
"In a world whose only desire is to devour everything, it's better to be nothing."
"The universe sacrifices itself in us."
"A lack of love, the lack of love that was afflicting the world then and still does now, that was the thing contaminating the baptismal water, a lack of love that not only affects the world but that is emptying it out, as though it were erasing it, and, well, in short, what I'm using these examples to say is that the fossil dimension is something that, after existing as a virtual latency, suddenly emerges, like your face, which seems very familiar to me, as though you and I have met before, as though your face came from some very far-off place in time, I don't know, do you know what I mean?"
"As with vinyl records, the world's objects all had surfaces marked by grooves and micro-grooves and you just had to find the right needle to extract their story, their particular and previously unheard story. [...] and that everybody at some point in their life played the involuntary role of being somebody else's needle."
"Nothing exists until it has been named. Every epoch establishes its own concept of things, and our concepts of love and the way we feel and express it has come down to us from the Middle Ages; something called "courtly love".
"Here is a first paradox. To love consists in choosing someone from among the millions of people on the planet, segregating that person in order to ascribe virtues to them that only you can see, contemplating a marvel where the rest of the planet sees only statistics and ordinariness, creating a unique human, but only then to apply that courtly love template to them, which in turn standardizes the beloved."
"What did you think would happen? We aren't Romeo and Juliet, we aren't a poem or a novel, only humans."
"The most banal things brush up against their environment - against life - in a way that creates a surprising sort of friction with fiction. In short, banal reality is always distinct from everything. But love, in any of its manifestations, is far more difficult to represent than anything that has been experienced; the effort required to bring love into the ambit of fiction, and to make it credible, is almost infinite."
"Our very kiss is a solar eclipse, so absorbent that it sucks up all the light in the world, leaving everything in darkness. It's the only way we know how to join our appetite in a single body. If you stare at the lightbulb in the bedroom when it's on, you also only see a dark point at its centre, so dark that you don't know what to call it. A point where the light absorbs itself."
"We die because in the moment we're born, something installs itself inside us that is not exactly death but resembles it too closely."
"There is a movement towards the bone that is missing from my ribs, towards birds that have lost their way, towards a desert of lies with walls erected around them. In the Beginning there was also the darkness of a womb, and then a cry and tears at the contact with light For this reason, tears and light are sisters."
Read
May 3, 2025fascinating! not quite sure what to make of it! the carson (and barthes) influence was delectable. not a fan of how the female body was spoken about - so much emphasis on being a passive receptacle for penetration which was kind of random lol, but given the plot twist (???) at the end it might make sense? actually no it doesn’t. he’ll call a penis a penis but a vagina has to be ‘her sex’ lol. i guess very heternormative for a book on the expansiveness of love sigh
July 25, 2022
“Se persigue el cuestionamiento del amor como se persigue el cuestionamiento de los logotipos de las empresas, las danzas folklóricas, la quema de libros o la destrucción de estampas de Nuestra Señora de Fátima. El motivo no es otro que con tales destrucciones se llegaría a exhibir lo que hay detrás de todo ello: nada, o al menos nada de lo que se suponía.(Amor logotipo)”
Me pasa con los libros de Fernández Mallo que me estimulan mucho, no sólo mientras los leo sino también cuando paseo, veo una película o mantengo una conversación. Empiezo a encontrar relaciones insospechadas, a veces no tengo que hacer mucho esfuerzo. Aún no he acabado de leer ‘El libro de todos los amores’ y ya he tenido un montón de coincidencias entre lo que leía y me pasaba. Está tarde me tomaba un vermú en un local de Oviedo (La Paloma) con solera y viejos carteles de Martini y leo el párrafo de más arriba. Un poco antes había leído que Juana de Arco cayó muerta hacia el lado izquierdo en su ejecución y en un grupo de wasap de amigos aparece una foto de la estatua de la santa en París. Ayer mismo paseaba por una exposición de cuadros del Museo del Prado depositados en el de Oviedo y más tarde leía a Mallo referirse a los archivos humanos de memoria y de las dimensiones mucho más ingentes de lo olvidado, lo que me hizo repensar lo que había visto. Podría seguir pero con ‘El libro de todos los amores’ no podría hacer bibliomancia, aquel arte adivinatorio que consistiría en abrirse al azar la Biblia u otro libro importante para conocer el futuro. Más bien tengo que salir del libro para hacer una mancia con lo real y disfrutar aún más con su lectura.
Me pasa con los libros de Fernández Mallo que me estimulan mucho, no sólo mientras los leo sino también cuando paseo, veo una película o mantengo una conversación. Empiezo a encontrar relaciones insospechadas, a veces no tengo que hacer mucho esfuerzo. Aún no he acabado de leer ‘El libro de todos los amores’ y ya he tenido un montón de coincidencias entre lo que leía y me pasaba. Está tarde me tomaba un vermú en un local de Oviedo (La Paloma) con solera y viejos carteles de Martini y leo el párrafo de más arriba. Un poco antes había leído que Juana de Arco cayó muerta hacia el lado izquierdo en su ejecución y en un grupo de wasap de amigos aparece una foto de la estatua de la santa en París. Ayer mismo paseaba por una exposición de cuadros del Museo del Prado depositados en el de Oviedo y más tarde leía a Mallo referirse a los archivos humanos de memoria y de las dimensiones mucho más ingentes de lo olvidado, lo que me hizo repensar lo que había visto. Podría seguir pero con ‘El libro de todos los amores’ no podría hacer bibliomancia, aquel arte adivinatorio que consistiría en abrirse al azar la Biblia u otro libro importante para conocer el futuro. Más bien tengo que salir del libro para hacer una mancia con lo real y disfrutar aún más con su lectura.
March 15, 2022
Sus defectos (pretencioso, deslabazado, cerebral, opaco) son sus virtudes (ambicioso, fractal, estimulante, misterioso).
Atmósfera onírica, prosa elegante y magnética. De ritmo sosegado pero imparable, como la marca de las aguas cada vez más arriba en las fachadas de Venecia. A ratos una performance poética, a ratos un documental de Discovery, a ratos una conferencia, a ratos una película de Hitchcock o de Lynch.
Atmósfera onírica, prosa elegante y magnética. De ritmo sosegado pero imparable, como la marca de las aguas cada vez más arriba en las fachadas de Venecia. A ratos una performance poética, a ratos un documental de Discovery, a ratos una conferencia, a ratos una película de Hitchcock o de Lynch.
March 24, 2022
Aburridísimo. Una ida de olla, vestida como si fuera un manual técnico. Una pena, porque tiene libros excelentes
March 5, 2024
the tumblr girlies would’ve eaten this up i know it
March 15, 2024
Mallo ❤️
Wat een heerlijk, uniek boek weer. Vooral genoten van de Venice-passages.
Wat een heerlijk, uniek boek weer. Vooral genoten van de Venice-passages.
December 24, 2024
Simply WOW - what a gorgeous, breathtaking, beautifully written and evocative novel. This book is quite literally everything - fiction, non fiction, philosophy, all weaving together seamlessly through observations on many different types of love, all based on almost any metaphysical, conceptual, or physical substrate. Here we explore predominately romantic love through musings on nature, music, senses, death, language, technology, history, basically everything. And all of it set against the oncoming apocalypse and its aftermath through the love between our two protagonists through space and time.
Just phenomenal. Not a book to read quickly, some passages absolutely went over my head, and the back and forth between genres and long pieces of dialogue written fully in stream of consciousness was absolutely hard to process at times, so if you're up for a challenging and intellectual read, would ABSOLUTELY recommend this. One of the best books I read all year.
Just phenomenal. Not a book to read quickly, some passages absolutely went over my head, and the back and forth between genres and long pieces of dialogue written fully in stream of consciousness was absolutely hard to process at times, so if you're up for a challenging and intellectual read, would ABSOLUTELY recommend this. One of the best books I read all year.
April 26, 2023
La verdad, me ha parecido un libro tedioso...me ha gustado mucho la idea de mezclar géneros literarios (poesía, ensayo y narrativa) y había varias percepciones sobre el amor interesantes. Sin embargo, no me ha parecido atractivo. La historia me aburría y no le he encontrado el sentido a muchas reflexiones que, sencillamente, sobraban.
July 3, 2024
INCREIBLE Y PERFECTO... justo lo que necesitaba en mi vida en este momento
December 29, 2024
“El misterio es una creación del lenguaje."
June 29, 2025
Gorgeous and thought provoking, what more do you want
Read
January 21, 2025DNF at 40%
The prose is beautiful and the translation is very well done. I’m just not on board with the rambling sort of narration between the two characters. This is just not for me
The prose is beautiful and the translation is very well done. I’m just not on board with the rambling sort of narration between the two characters. This is just not for me
December 11, 2025
i’m not clever enough to give this 5 stars but i really enjoyed it
February 13, 2025
The Book of All Loves è un'opera coinvolgente, ma non sempre di immediata comprensione. La sua natura ibrida—un intreccio di poesia, fiction, dialoghi, filosofia e storia—rende la lettura a tratti complessa, come se il filo del discorso sfuggisse di mano. Forse perché un unico discorso non esiste, forse perché il libro stesso rispecchia le molteplici forme dell’amore: alcune accessibili, altre più sfuggenti e di difficile interpretazione.
3. ⭐️
3. ⭐️
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