Agustín Fernández MalloCritiques

En este brillante ensayo, que perfila los límites de la multitud y desvela los procesos crípticos que nos conforman, Agustín Fernández Mallo traza una genealogía de un capitalismo indefinidamente expansivo, partiendo de una idea del ser como una entidad incompleta, dispersa y difuminada desde la primera interacción del cuerpo con el entorno. Ya en la era premoderna, las religiones, las ideologías políticas, los sistemas filosóficos y las ciencias han tratado de analizar al ser humano, de recopilar la información cuantificable sobre la gente, para producir un conglomerado uniforme e indiferenciado, una forma de multitud cuyo comportamiento, tanto individual como colectivo, sea predecible. Este ensayo propone que los mismos mecanismos operan en la Red, un espacio que acoge todos los datos contables de los individuos en una masa anónima, y que genera, a través de los algoritmos y a una velocidad tan rápida que se nos escapa, una identidad fantasma para cada uno de nosotros, que ya no es la que teníamos (o creíamos que teníamos), sino una amalgama de la que surge nuestra identidad estadística, un conglomerado de datos estadísticos operados por bots que manejan nuestras emociones y determinan nuestras decisiones. Así, Agustín Fernández Mallo nos descubre que, en contra de lo que pudiera pensarse, el capitalismo está hoy lejos de ser depuesto o superado, y, a través de un análisis ameno, sorprendente y esclarecedor, reflexiona acerca de grandes cuestiones filosóficas como dónde queda la libertad en este contexto, qué ocurre con la relación con el otro, por qué, en un mundo ambivalente entre lo analógico y lo digital, aparece una soledad inédita, cuál es el territorio de la intimidad y de la creación en este hábitat en el que nos desarrollamos y vivimos como multitud.
En este brillante ensayo, que perfila los límites de la multitud y desvela los procesos crípticos que nos conforman, Agustín Fernández Mallo traza una genealogía de un capitalismo indefinidamente expansivo, partiendo de una idea del ser como una entidad incompleta, dispersa y difuminada desde la primera interacción del cuerpo con el entorno. Ya en la era premoderna, las religiones, las ideologías políticas, los sistemas filosóficos y las ciencias han tratado de analizar al ser humano, de recopilar la información cuantificable sobre la gente, para producir un conglomerado uniforme e indiferenciado, una forma de multitud cuyo comportamiento, tanto individual como colectivo, sea predecible. Este ensayo propone que los mismos mecanismos operan en la Red, un espacio que acoge todos los datos contables de los individuos en una masa anónima, y que genera, a través de los algoritmos y a una velocidad tan rápida que se nos escapa, una identidad fantasma para cada uno de nosotros, que ya no es la que teníamos (o creíamos que teníamos), sino una amalgama de la que surge nuestra identidad estadística, un conglomerado de datos estadísticos operados por bots que manejan nuestras emociones y determinan nuestras decisiones. Así, Agustín Fernández Mallo nos descubre que, en contra de lo que pudiera pensarse, el capitalismo está hoy lejos de ser depuesto o superado, y, a través de un análisis ameno, sorprendente y esclarecedor, reflexiona acerca de grandes cuestiones filosóficas como dónde queda la libertad en este contexto, qué ocurre con la relación con el otro, por qué, en un mundo ambivalente entre lo analógico y lo digital, aparece una soledad inédita, cuál es el territorio de la intimidad y de la creación en este hábitat en el que nos desarrollamos y vivimos como multitud.

Un gin con limón. Una habitación de hotel. Una isla mediterránea. Un tipo al que su chica ha abandonado creyendo que una casa no agota todos los mapas. Y un monigote atornillado a la puerta del lavabo que no deja de hablar y que, en su largo monólogo existencial, aúna literatura, la belleza del caos que se extiende ante la ausencia infinita, con ciencia, la fría rigurosidad carnívora del número exacto, del azar entendido como obra de arte que se decapita a sí misma a cada instante.

«No estoy segura de que él estuviera dispuesto a bajar a las profundidades a las que hay que bajar para mirar a los ojos a una secuestrada y ver la clase de monstruo allí depositado. A veces he pensado que debe de ser similar a contemplar los ojos de un animal disecado que de pronto hubiera regresado a la vida.»
Una mujer cuenta el secuestro al que fue sometida en México D.F. con frialdad pasmosa y atendiendo a detalles inéditos. Una pareja atraviesa Estados Unidos en coche a la busca del quimérico y remoto Sonido del Fin. Dos músicos se encierran en un château del norte de Francia para componer y grabar su obra definitiva. Un escritor español relata los inicios de su relación con la enigmática mujer a la que conoce en una librería mexicana.

La literatura como juego. Propuestas de ensayo. Una perspectiva celeste, desde arriba, pero lejos de ser superflua, incisiva como la mirada de los halcones que aparecen en la novela.
Reflexiones sobre la guerra: su legalidad, su ritual. Sobre el conservacionismo y el reciclaje, entendido éste como damnatio memoriae, como un reciclaje de la Historia, sobre todo de la intrahistoria, lo que coadyuva a la reescritura de la Historia.
Ucronías imposibles, el juego del doble, identidades-relaciones engañosas,…; malabares que velan la retícula literaria sobre la que se asienta toda la novela. Una red mortuoria intrínseca a la vida porque “Es un error dar por hecho lo que fue contemplado”.

Tres libros en los que se nos cuentan tres historias. La primera es la de un primer personaje que asiste a un congreso sobre redes en la isla de San Simón, antiguamente prisión en la que estuvo el pirata Drake, después lazareto y, ya en el siglo XX, campo de concentración durante la guerra civil. Tras esta estancia, el hombre vuelve a la isla para permanecer allí un mes solo, de forma clandestina.
En el segundo libro se nos cuenta la historia de Kurt, el cuarto astronauta que fue a la luna con Armstrong, Aldrin y Collins pero del que nadie tiene noticia porque, al ser el encargado de fotografiar y filmar a sus compañeros, él no aparece en ninguna imagen del acontecimiento.
Finalmente el tercer libro cuenta la historia de una mujer, presumiblemente relacionada con el personaje de la primera historia, que decide recorrer la costa Normanda a pie, para recorrer todos aquellos lugares en los que ocurrió el desembarco de los aliados durante la II Guerra Mundial.
Los tres acontecimientos a su vez se ven unidos por tres piedras angulares que recorren el libro, una frase del poeta gallego desaparecido, Carlos Oroza, "Es un error dar por hecho lo que fue contemplado", la referencia continua a la guerra, Guerra Civil, Vietnam, II GM, etc., y la presencia también constante de la ciencia y la religión como fuente de interpretación del mundo.
En todo caso, el autor deja patente en un momento de la narración que son las guerras las que nos unen, parafraseando a Ginsberg cuando dijo en su poema AULLIDO: «He visto las mejores mentes de mi generación destruidas por la locura», que ahora seguro cambiaría por: «He visto a las mejores mentes de mi generación destruidas por Facebook».
El libro no deja un momento de descanso con esa forma que tiene Fernández Mallo de contar en la que el hilo se extiende en todas direcciones, en las que a veces las reflexiones son, en mi opinión, un poco rebuscadas y repetitivas, pero que en la mayoría de los casos nos llevan a buen puerto. Esos hilos forman figuras fractales de las que también el autor nos presenta en forma de digresión de la misma manera que encontramos a Stanley y Livingston, al físico belga George Lemaitre, la historia de los Cloisters en Nueva York, Dali o la presencia mucho más importante de García Lorca y de Sebald y sus anillos de Saturno.
La conclusión a la que llega finalmente nos retrotrae de nuevo al verso de Oroza, "Es un error dar por hecho lo que fue contemplado", lo que relativiza nuestra vida así como la muerte de los otros. Esa es la verdadera conexión entre tod@s nosotr@s.

The Nocilla trilogy is strange. It feels familiar in the way the internet does. The first two books are told in a similar style: they present about a page of text in third person about a person struggling with their relationship to something or someone—typically something, manifested through their relationship with someone. I can’t claim to understand them in any overarching or systematic way. They seem like they present a vision of our relationship to allegory and metaphor while playing in a space that feels similar to 2666, in the sense that if we can’t have a coherent narrative or present a singular story we all rally behind we can still have something. It builds on that, even though the author admits to never having read it, though there is a character who airs out his theorems on clotheslines much like a character in Bolaño’s novel airs out a geometry book on a clothesline. We spend time in both books thinking about what this means to the character and to us as readers, and I’m not really sure we get super far in a way I can set down definitively, though the experience is interesting, if not enlightening.

The last book, Nocilla Lab, is where things change. The form changes suddenly: the first part is a single 64-page sentence. I liked this part a lot, though it was challenging to read because the style of the previous books remained: nearly but not quite verse, but set in prose. I won’t spoil the rest of the book, but it plays with form and representation and metaphor in a way few pieces of media do.
There are parts I don’t like. I don’t like how most of the characters are men, how there’s a kind of universality to the phallocentrism of all the narratives, even the ones about women. I don’t like how in one case, a character offers a terrible description of a fat women after she chides him for smoking in a non-smoking area. (The author loves cigarettes more than almost anything. This comes through clearly in every book.) This character offers a page of beautiful description and metaphor and inference about how terrible this woman is, how she embodies all that is bad in humanity, &c, but does not turn his critical lens on himself and both what he was doing to prompt the rebuke and what his own behavior means in the context of what he’s discussing. Perhaps that’s kind of the point. It’s a good writer that can make me continue to read a book after I loathe a character.
These books are absolutely worth your time.

(This is a stub.)

There are things happening here that you need to see.

If you’ve ever tried to tell a story by reblogging posts on tumblr, selectively, with meaning and symbols and interstital commentary, then this is kind of like that.

A physicist’s attempt at embodying a theory of post-poetry in fiction. Narrative tapas. I like these books *a lot*.

A Poorly Constructed Novel, With a Poor Use of Visual Material and an Entirely Unconscious Sexism

First (A) some remarks on the book's use of photographs, drawings, a graphic novel, and an associated video. I read this book in connection with the writingwithimages.com project, because it has so many visual elements. After that, some more negative things: (B) the book's construction, and (C) its really surprising sexism.

(A) The visual elements

This third and final volume of the Nocilla trilogy has three parts: "I. Automatic Search Engine," "II. Automatic Engine," and "III. Engine Parts." I think it may be truer to the reading experience to divide it in six:

1. "Automatic Search Engine," which is an 80-page run-on sentence. (Not a single sentence, as I wrote about Mathias Enard's "Crossing the Zone." Not incidentally, both are translated in Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Enard has contributed to the tidal swells of praise of the Nocilla trilogy.)

2. "Automatic Engine," which is 44 numbered sections, interrupted by

3. Eight pages of photographs, with words that have supposedly been typed on them.

4. The first part of "Engine Parts," which is set in monospace type, as if it has been typed.

5. The second part of "Engine Parts," which is a self-contained graphic novel.

6. There is also a video project, named in the book (in "Notes and Credits," two pages after the end of the novel). It is on the author's website (fernandezmallo.megustaleer.com) and on Vimeo at vimeo.com/6897147.

I put it this way because these visual interruptions are more important, in the reading experience, than the three titled parts.

Images are crucial in the book and yet they are extremely carelessly done. To justify that I need to make three myopic criticisms.

A single image, of a page of the narrator's notebook, appears by itself on p. 84. There are several other references to the notebook, but no other illustrations, even though there are other passages that could make good use of reproductions, such as the measurements of the prison on pp. 105-108. The picture in question is the plan of a campsite. Inexplicably, names of the parts of the campsite are printed (not drawn) on the sketch; apparently readers aren't meant to ask themselves how that happened.

The Eight pages of photographs are introduced in the narrative just preceding them (pp. 127-29): they are pictures the narrator took and then printed out and put into his typewriter. But they're clearly pictures that have been scanned and lettered in an image processing app: the text is white on black, and too neat to be a typewriter. Again readers are not expected to be looking that closely.

The short graphic novel at the end of the book has tiny print -- too small to read comfortably -- indicating it was drawn much larger, and that the reduction wasn't anticipated.

These are small points, but they go to a systemic issue: Fernandez Mallo expects readers to think mainly about his text, and to look only carelessly and quickly at his images. That is why it can make sense to divide the book in three parts, despite the surprising and anomalous presence of photographs and a graphic novel.

(B) The narrative

There's a good summary of the major parts of this book on Goodreads, written by Paul Fulcher. However I can't agree that the combination of elements "adds up to a wonderful mix." After "Automatic Search Engine," the 80-page run-on sentence, the book is exceptionally carelessly assembled. "Automatic Search Engine" owes something to Bernhard, Beckett, Enard, and others; it's seamless and tightly recursive. The following narrative of numbered sections, "Automatic Engine," follows suit in a more fragmented manner. All this is ruminative, self-reflective, and largely plotless, in the manner of any number of postmodern writers, including Krasznahorkai and Vila-Matas (who appears in the graphic novel).

But the book suddenly veers aside on p. 118, when it is revealed that the owner of a hotel has the same name as the author. From that moment onward, it reads like genre fiction. Sometimes it's like detective fiction (the narrator searches the hotel), or crime fiction (the narrator knifes his namesake), or Poe (the hotel become mysterious and sinister), or even King (roots from the other side of the Earth push up through the garden).

I don't mind collages of manners and influences, but these are not managed allusions. The pages feel improvised, and they come across as a failure of imagination. It takes concentration and a steady purpose to write 80 pages of continuous monologue. It's relatively easy to make up new mysteries and inexplicable events every couple pages. I don't think this is postmodern collage at all; I think it's a lapse in energy and resources. The short graphic novel isn't the fascinating turn into the visual world that it might have been: it's simply pasted on.

The book is badly constructed, and it doesn't represent our contemporary digital age, which is infinitely more aware of the visual and of different media.

(C) The sexism

I have difficulty understanding why the reviews I've seen don't mention the book's endemic sexism. The narrator has a female companion through most of the book. At one point he says she's brilliant, and she says great things, but she's only quoted three or four times, and most of those sentences include the word "fuck." The narrator spends his days writing (he's working on the novel we're reading), but we have almost no idea what she does all day except swim and smoke. When the narrator spends time with people, we're told she doesn't speak. We're told over and over -- all the way to the very end of the novel -- that she bought a bikini with daisies on the breasts. We're told over and over that she bought new knickers every day. Piles of her knickers turn up in unexpected places. There must be fifty or more references to them.

This is head-shaking, endemic, rooted, unconscious, unironic sexism. If it were at all self-aware, in any capacity, I might want to defend it. What makes it disastrous is the continuous distraction of the fact that the implied author thinks all's well.

This is the sequel to Nocilla Dream, which I read and thought very good last year – see here. There is a third book, Nocilla Lab, although I can find no information on when Fitzcarraldo Editions plans to publish it, or indeed Mallo’s most recent novel, Limbo. Like the first book, Nocilla Experience is split into numbered sections, 112 in total, some several pages long, others no more than a sentence or two. They are a mix of fiction and fact, or, such as in the case of the snippets of dialogue from Apocalypse Now, found documents. The main narratives all deal with obsession – a man who is trying to eat every box of corn flakes he can find with a sell-by date the same as his ex-wife’s birthday; another who turns bubblegum stuck to pavement into tiny paintings; a third man runs a restaurant that serves up found objects instead of food, although they’re presented as food… It’s a fascinating literary experiment, although I’m not entirely sure how it’s supposed to fit together – or if indeed it’s meant to. And, for some reason, much as I liked it, Nocilla Experience didn’t quite appeal to me as much as Nocilla Dream did. But I’m still looking forward to the third book… and I wonder if there are any Spanish writers inspired by Mallo – the “Nocilla generation” – who have also been translated into English…½

This is the first book of a trilogy, and the second book, Nocilla Experience. will be published in English next month. Despite my disappointment with some aspects of Nocilla Dream, it’s on my wish list. But Nocilla Dream… The book is structured as 113 sections, which vary in length from several lines to several pages. There also excerpts from other books and scholarly articles, on a wide range of subjects. There is no plot per se. Repeated mention is made of a tree on the desert road between Carson City and Ely, Nevada, over whose branches people have thrown pairs of shoes. Some of the stories involve people who have provided at least one pair of those shoes; some of the others involve people who have interacted with those people. The stories take place all over the world – which results in one of my gripes: a couple of sections are set in Denmark and it’s a very unconvincing depiction of the country. Another gripe is more the publisher’s fault, as on page 87, the section is headed “Relevant physical constants”, and the exponential figures haven’t been printed with the powers as superscript – so you get, for example, “Speed of Light, c = 3.00 x 108 m/s” when it should be 3.00 x 108 m/s. Despite these, Nocilla Dream is fascinating, does some very interesting things with narrative structure, and I’m looking forward to reading the remaining two books in the trilogy. I will admit to some disappointment, however, when I discovered that Nocilla is a brand-name of a Nutella-like spread in Spain…½

Nocilla dream consists of 113 separate fragments.
These fragments deal with excerpts from popular articles, concepts in textbooks, personal journals, and vignettes. The plurality are less than a page long, although some can go up to five or six pages.
The characters of these stories move in and out of the orbits of each other. A diverse group, they cover surfers in California, a gas station attendant in Spain, and the inhabitants of a small fallout shelter civilization in the desert under Carson City, Nevada.
We watch as people move between various modes, sometimes traveling the world, and sometimes staying exactly where they are. All of the people share a similar restlessness, and there is an odd amount of doubling and trebling in people's life stories.
All of the people share a similar restlessness, and their lives are doubled and tripled on the page, from those who all share the same basic obsession with border territories and micro-nations, to the people who value odd and melancholic photography.
Each fragment, on its own, a piece in a larger puzzle, but also fractal – a complete portrait of a person's life at a moment, or a set of relevant information. The life is there, and the details that tie it upward and onwards only incidental. We know and love and care for each person on the pages, because we must.
The book is difficult, because of all the above reasons. The book is beautiful, because of all the above reasons.
Mallo, like Pynchon before him, and Borges as well, operates best in a mode where each line is so full of ideas that it should constitute its own story. A fantasy stuck in my mind, from late in the book: An argentine staying in an aparthotel in Vegas has lost faith in his idol. He paces his room, interacting with no one every day. And as he paces, makes turns, he imagines the person he would be at each rotation if he kept going straight instead of turning, on one end walking out the door of his home and back into his life, and the other end a ghostly object heading off into the distance, through the walls and out around the planet as it moves off into the void, a stream of him, his mind, his ghostly body heading to who knows where. This is only one or two sentences, and they are among the most surreal, but that is the novel in miniature, small strangeness brought on by the trials of human life.
It is, in Mallo's words, a matter of the post-poetic poetics moving into fiction, and in mine, about the way that events move into memory, which then refines what the world is, what counts and occurs as interaction. It's a beautiful book, but a difficult one.
On Rout 50, between Carson City and Ely, there is no vegetation, save for a single poplar that found water. The most impressive thing about this tree, beyond it's mere existence, are the shoes. It is covered in hundreds of pairs, trainers and hiking boots, boxing and fencing and riding shoes all layered. There are rumors of original Adidas Surfs in the tree as well.

Post-modern, yet fun and readable :) Told in 100+ short fragments incorporating the lives of the characters as well as real or adapted passages of non-fiction. This could be a recipe for chaos and the kind of self-indulgent book I dislike, but instead the passages are individually well constructed (almost prose poems) and gently link into a greater whole. Explores all sorts of things, but to me it is the significance of liminal spaces which stand out (near-empty desert, micronations, boundaries) which is kind of reflected in the way the book is written, almost constructed of overlooked leftovers which turn out to be gold dust forming a nugget of art.

Apparently a seminal book in Spanish literature, it has taken 10 years to make it to English translation -- thanks Thomas Bunstead and Fitzcarraldo Editions! The best thing is, it is the first of a series of 3 "Nocilla" books and English editions are coming soon. I can't wait!½

Un llibre interessant encara no l'he acabat de llegir

El chico que escribe la trilogía Nocilla es físico, trabaja como radiofísico y hace ya unos años fundó el movimiento postpoético. Su meta es una literatura que recoja entre sus elementos los contenidos de la ciencia. Yo he disfrutado mucho de la novela, que se va construyendo poco a poco entre horizontes de la América profunda, lugares comunes de la generación de la plastilina (o de la Nocilla) y la visión científica-poética del mundo, todo bien junto, como debe ser.