What do you think?
Rate this book
Rex
Now in paperback, José Manuel Prieto’s Rex is a sexy, zany, and sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos who have settled in western Europe.
J. is a young Cuban man who, thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Spanish, has become the tutor of the young son of a wealthy Russian couple living in Marbella, in the part of southern Spain that the Russian mafia has turned into its winter quarters. As J. attempts to give the boy a general grade-school education by exclusively reading him Proust, he also becomes the personal secretary of the boy’s father, Vasily, an ex-scientist that J. suspects is on the run from gangsters. Vasily’s wife, Nelly, a seductive woman always draped in mind-boggling quantities of precious stones, believes the only way to evade the gangsters is an extravagant plan linking Vasily to the throne of the czars.
Rex is an unforgettable achievement: an illusory, allusive gem of a novel that confirms José Manuel Prieto as one of the most talented writers of his generation.
J. is a young Cuban man who, thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Spanish, has become the tutor of the young son of a wealthy Russian couple living in Marbella, in the part of southern Spain that the Russian mafia has turned into its winter quarters. As J. attempts to give the boy a general grade-school education by exclusively reading him Proust, he also becomes the personal secretary of the boy’s father, Vasily, an ex-scientist that J. suspects is on the run from gangsters. Vasily’s wife, Nelly, a seductive woman always draped in mind-boggling quantities of precious stones, believes the only way to evade the gangsters is an extravagant plan linking Vasily to the throne of the czars.
Rex is an unforgettable achievement: an illusory, allusive gem of a novel that confirms José Manuel Prieto as one of the most talented writers of his generation.
- GenresLiteratureFiction
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2007
4 people are currently reading
69 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 5, 2012
At the end of the book, the author tries to explain that he's expanding the concept of "magical realism" into "magical science" including terms from physics like "event horizon" and "antigravity."
It didn't work.
Nothing could save this book. It reads as if narrated by a schizophrenic gemologist. There are no highlights. There is nothing to recommend this book. I finished it only because I am headstrong and if I can read 50 Shades of Grey I can read anything.
I hadn't taken into account the severe headache I would endure as my brain tried to find a thread, any thread, in the nonsense within the pages. This was crap. Period. I'm not even sure it would make good fertilizer.
As satisfying as a colonoscopy, and twice as refreshing. I will *run* from any further books by this author. Rex is on my short-list of books that shouldn't have been printed.
It didn't work.
Nothing could save this book. It reads as if narrated by a schizophrenic gemologist. There are no highlights. There is nothing to recommend this book. I finished it only because I am headstrong and if I can read 50 Shades of Grey I can read anything.
I hadn't taken into account the severe headache I would endure as my brain tried to find a thread, any thread, in the nonsense within the pages. This was crap. Period. I'm not even sure it would make good fertilizer.
As satisfying as a colonoscopy, and twice as refreshing. I will *run* from any further books by this author. Rex is on my short-list of books that shouldn't have been printed.
July 18, 2015
La evidencia salta a los ojos del lector tras apenas pasar unas pocas páginas de "Rex": Prieto tiene un estilo rico, conoce palabras muy cultas, ama la narración indirecta y oblicua, los paralelismos, la interpolación, la intertextualidad y demás regalías. Su narrador posee una voz vigorosa y cavernosa que truena desde lo más alto del Himalaya y alcanza cada confín del planeta. ¿Y qué proclama esta voz tan grave y emperifollada? ¿Impactantes revelaciones? No! Letras de Bananarama.
O sea que, por más que emplee todo lujo de altisonancias, el resultado final es tan pertinente como gastarse 200€ en comida para un canario que no tienes. El estilo rebuscado y engolado viene a contar no más de cuatro hechos. Empieza, párrafo sí y párrafo no, con analogías y referencias al dichoso libro (En busca del tiempo perdido) y todos estos comentarios van dirigidos a su hipotético discípulo, que el pobre debe estar un poco hastiado de tanta pesadez. Es tan repetitivo que resulta cargante. Se nota tan obcecado en volver una y otra vez a los mismos hechos por tal de retener la narración que acaba por ser enervante. Está bien recurrir a ese tipo de trucos cuando sirve para profundizar y detallar hechos complejos, cuando sólo sirven para que el escritor marque paquete, por el contrario, es contraproducente. Fanfarria pura y mero floripondio.
En las últimas páginas salta a los ojos del lector otra evidencia, ésta bien distinta: uno tiene los huevos o los ovarios hinchados con tanto machacar con el escritor, las frases interrogantes y el pobre Petia. Sí, terminas petado de Petia. Prieto, muyayo, eres aséptico, anodino y pretencioso.
Dios nos libre de los ingenieros reciclados a novelistas.
She's got it
Yeah, baby, she's got it
I'm your Venus, I'm your fire
At your desire
Well, I'm your Venus, I'm your fire
At your desire
O sea que, por más que emplee todo lujo de altisonancias, el resultado final es tan pertinente como gastarse 200€ en comida para un canario que no tienes. El estilo rebuscado y engolado viene a contar no más de cuatro hechos. Empieza, párrafo sí y párrafo no, con analogías y referencias al dichoso libro (En busca del tiempo perdido) y todos estos comentarios van dirigidos a su hipotético discípulo, que el pobre debe estar un poco hastiado de tanta pesadez. Es tan repetitivo que resulta cargante. Se nota tan obcecado en volver una y otra vez a los mismos hechos por tal de retener la narración que acaba por ser enervante. Está bien recurrir a ese tipo de trucos cuando sirve para profundizar y detallar hechos complejos, cuando sólo sirven para que el escritor marque paquete, por el contrario, es contraproducente. Fanfarria pura y mero floripondio.
En las últimas páginas salta a los ojos del lector otra evidencia, ésta bien distinta: uno tiene los huevos o los ovarios hinchados con tanto machacar con el escritor, las frases interrogantes y el pobre Petia. Sí, terminas petado de Petia. Prieto, muyayo, eres aséptico, anodino y pretencioso.
Dios nos libre de los ingenieros reciclados a novelistas.
June 9, 2016
This is the kind of book I should have loved. It's also the kind of book college students, awash in this kind of thinking, would probably cherish. But in the end, it just wasn't my cup of tea.
Prieto's style is a kind of mix between Umberto Eco, Javier Marias, and Peter Ackroyd. An odd mix, I know. Eco, who died earlier this year, was a master of synthesizing culture. Marias is a master of the existential novel. Ackroyd is the one who does this sort of thing most plainly, who is able to turn any literary touchstone into a thing with new life. Prieto, it seems, is kind of his opposite number.
Rex is the end of an ambitious trilogy, in which Prieto declares his devotion to the literature he loves. The concluding note at the end of the book explains that readers who think the narrator of Rex is talking only of Proust are mistaken, and proceeds to demonstrate by detailing the great number of other allusions he's made in the book. And yet, for Prieto, they obviously find their one voice in Proust, and everyone else pales in comparison. It's a fanatical statement with a fanatical narrator, driven mad by an impossible situation, becoming a tutor to the child of a would-be king of crime, driven by so much ego he even envisions ascending to a new Russian monarchy. The narrator becomes embroiled in this affair, thanks in no small part to his obsessive nature and his inability to distinguish the need for boundaries, such as how it's probably inappropriate to lust over his student's mother and talk about it, incessantly, with the student himself...
The format is no less baffling. Short chapters broken into fairly arbitrary sections called commentaries, whatever it is Prieto meant to accomplish is lost on anyone not equally lost in whatever his influences ultimately are. It's a true wonder of fiction, surely, and his command of language is exemplary. Any lover of words will find much to admire here. Yet the whole thing smacks of hollow ambition. Which is to say, if nothing else, Prieto bit off more than he could chew. He's so enamored with this bird cage he's constructed, it never occurred to him that the reader would actually want the narrator to, at some point, make sense. Or at least, find a character who makes it for him. To put a bird in the cage, in other words.
Prieto no doubt has talent. I would hope, in the future, he doesn't allow himself to be so easily carried away with it.
Prieto's style is a kind of mix between Umberto Eco, Javier Marias, and Peter Ackroyd. An odd mix, I know. Eco, who died earlier this year, was a master of synthesizing culture. Marias is a master of the existential novel. Ackroyd is the one who does this sort of thing most plainly, who is able to turn any literary touchstone into a thing with new life. Prieto, it seems, is kind of his opposite number.
Rex is the end of an ambitious trilogy, in which Prieto declares his devotion to the literature he loves. The concluding note at the end of the book explains that readers who think the narrator of Rex is talking only of Proust are mistaken, and proceeds to demonstrate by detailing the great number of other allusions he's made in the book. And yet, for Prieto, they obviously find their one voice in Proust, and everyone else pales in comparison. It's a fanatical statement with a fanatical narrator, driven mad by an impossible situation, becoming a tutor to the child of a would-be king of crime, driven by so much ego he even envisions ascending to a new Russian monarchy. The narrator becomes embroiled in this affair, thanks in no small part to his obsessive nature and his inability to distinguish the need for boundaries, such as how it's probably inappropriate to lust over his student's mother and talk about it, incessantly, with the student himself...
The format is no less baffling. Short chapters broken into fairly arbitrary sections called commentaries, whatever it is Prieto meant to accomplish is lost on anyone not equally lost in whatever his influences ultimately are. It's a true wonder of fiction, surely, and his command of language is exemplary. Any lover of words will find much to admire here. Yet the whole thing smacks of hollow ambition. Which is to say, if nothing else, Prieto bit off more than he could chew. He's so enamored with this bird cage he's constructed, it never occurred to him that the reader would actually want the narrator to, at some point, make sense. Or at least, find a character who makes it for him. To put a bird in the cage, in other words.
Prieto no doubt has talent. I would hope, in the future, he doesn't allow himself to be so easily carried away with it.
October 28, 2012
This modernist, or if you prefer, post-modernist novel gets just a little too self consciously clever for my taste. It is appropriately fragmentary, erudite, self-reflexive, and allusive--for a modernist (or post-modernist) work. It has a fairly interesting plot, disguised and filtered through a thick maze of defamiliarization that one can get completely caught up in. It is often entertaining. And the translator has done a fine job of maintaining the nuances, stylistic flair, and indeterminacy of the prose itself (I checked).
But you have to want to stay with this sort of game-like structure for it to work. Nabokov was really good at getting readers to want to do that, and for a couple of generations since, they have continued to get lost inside his halls of mirrors, following plot and narrative ploys by turns, where the balance is key. This book though is closer to Gide's The Counterfeiters. If you don't remember it, it's because it was much more caught up in the paraphernalia of modernism and much less balanced with story-telling per se.
The author's note at the end is annoyingly superfluous. It would have been so much more effective if the note itself were part of the fiction, in the best modernist tradition, sending readers out on false interpretive leads rather than, as it appears to do, providing the bulk of the allusions in a tidy list and even some interpretive strategies for how to approach reading the book. It loses all the irony that is one of the strong points of the book.
Luckily, it leaves some things out for readers to enjoy discovering for themselves.
But you have to want to stay with this sort of game-like structure for it to work. Nabokov was really good at getting readers to want to do that, and for a couple of generations since, they have continued to get lost inside his halls of mirrors, following plot and narrative ploys by turns, where the balance is key. This book though is closer to Gide's The Counterfeiters. If you don't remember it, it's because it was much more caught up in the paraphernalia of modernism and much less balanced with story-telling per se.
The author's note at the end is annoyingly superfluous. It would have been so much more effective if the note itself were part of the fiction, in the best modernist tradition, sending readers out on false interpretive leads rather than, as it appears to do, providing the bulk of the allusions in a tidy list and even some interpretive strategies for how to approach reading the book. It loses all the irony that is one of the strong points of the book.
Luckily, it leaves some things out for readers to enjoy discovering for themselves.
August 21, 2010
This book's sentence-level style and characterization lend it a surrealism hard to wrap my head around. Full of fabulation and unbelievable behaviors that nonetheless make sense in the context of the book. This is a book I will want to read again.
Read
October 16, 2012I'm having trouble getting through this one, for some reason. I think I need to return to it when I have more free time to devote to it. Also, I feel the need to return it to the library so that someone who will love it will pick it up and take it home.
March 2, 2010
Boring!!
Read
July 12, 2010The Center excerpted this in Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed.
September 18, 2010
Complicated and puzzling because one
keeps thinking of phrases and description
from Lolita or Speak Memory by Nabokov.
Beautiful language.
keeps thinking of phrases and description
from Lolita or Speak Memory by Nabokov.
Beautiful language.
Want to read
May 18, 2012I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11134869
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11134869
January 28, 2016
Admeto un cert art a l’escriure, els detalls eren bonics. Però era esgotador i no me’l vaig poder acabar.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews