A surrealist Catalan novel which Douglas Settle, founder of the small press Fum d’Estampa, was recently mad enough to translate and publish, Summa Kaotica mocks both sides of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Franco regime through use of a zany inventive language and outlandish plot scenarios. Its enemy is the green froth of totalitarianism spread by fleas and potato beetles that enters by the ears and takes over the mind. It is a riposte to the proclamation of the new authoritarian regime: “chastity in zpectacle, books and publicazions. Nothing zpicy or zaucy!” It is overflowing with a wild creativity that makes it somewhat difficult to follow yet often quite compelling.

I found it best when following its child protagonist Anamorphus on wild adventures, which dominate Part One, beginning with a sequence of linearly told set pieces. Anamorphus goes on an adventure into the deep woods with a vampire-werewolf and its human doppelgänger who think they can seize a dragon’s treasure. He goes to a mad wizard’s lair where a sequence of events leads to an ancient talking head floating about causing trouble. Villagers hold a satanic mass in the local cathedral and prematurely burn it down around themselves. And so on.

It tended to weaken my interest when pulling back its focus to riff on wider political and societal happenings, giving the reader firehoses of language full of nonsensical proper nouns to refer to people and groups that may be clever in Catalan but lose references and meaning in an English version (this is in fact one of the book’s outstanding features, which seems destined to get lost in any translation). Part Two was more of this.

It is fully imaginative; partly, it is in bad taste, particularly in sexual matters in which there are uncomfortable elements of abuse. Is that sort of thing more permissible in a surrealist satire? And now I’m thinking of a quote from Nick Cave that has stuck in my head since I heard it twenty years ago: “How can the imagination be told how to behave?”. Amettler’s imagination is not on its good behavior in repeated cases, let’s stipulate to that.

The following passage may get across a suitable impression of all the above in a short bit. Anamorphus and his caregiver have walked to the city of Jobville, supposedly a utopian republican paradise but actually full of filth and starving people in a physical environment drawing from Dante’s version of Hell:

In the light of a blurry full moon amidst the ghostly fog and in the company of skull-like stars, inhabited by evil thoughts, they arrived at the deepest point of the crater-puddle, the enormous, formless centre, the rotten heart of Jobville. Putrefactive materials, dried excrement, menstrual rags, placentas and aborted babies were being burnt everywhere in macabre fires that smoked out the smoky shadows. Night was day for the Jobville insane, and the no-space (no-streets, no-squares) were filled with half-naked spectres and utterly degenerate, infected whores who emerged from the brothels and venereal hospices in search of illusory food. From a recess where the stinking smoke made breathing impossible, a reptilian voice muttered: “If my eyes do not fail me, I would swear you are Gigi. But you are very well-dressed, like an Amazon Queen or Valkyrie and accompanied by a most handsome youth.” They turned and saw some manner of human mummy, nude and wrinkled.

“Hello, Asheverus!” said Kamil-la-Gigi-Minne.

Recommended for readers who like a challenge. 3.5 for me with a bonus half point for originality. ( )