The author bio tells me that Agustín Fernández Mallo’s ‘Nocilla Trilogy’ (of which 2006’s Nocilla Drream is the first volume) was instrumental in bringing about an aesthetic shift in contemporary Spanish writing. Now we get to read Nocilla Dream in English, courtesy of translator Thomas Bunstead and Fitzcarraldo Editions; and you can see why this novel must have shaken things up. Nocilla Dream has a teeming cast of characters, with hints at a web of hidden connections – and that’s where the similarity with a conventional plot-driven novel ends.
Each of Nocilla Dream’s 113 chapters consists of a single paragraph, from a few pages down to a few lines. Some are extracts from other books; some come from New York Times articles; others are snapshots from the lives of various characters. Amongst others, we’ll read about Falconetti, an ex-soldier who left San Francisco with the idea of circumnavigating the globe from west to east; Pat Garrett, who wanders around carrying a suitcase of found photographs; and a community of surfers in south-east China, with its roots in a group of North American expatriates. Many of the novel’s events revolve around U.S. Route 50, with one recurring image being a poplar tree from whose branches people have hung shoes. Trees in general are a common metaphor throughout the novel, particularly in terms of the idea that branching networks underpin reality.
I’m going to quote an extended passage which illustrates various aspects of Fernández Mallo’s approach. Here is Chii-Teen, a Chinese character, looking through some old newspaper cuttings:
On the reverse of one of the cuttings, he’s come across a picture of an elderly painter, clearly from the West, distinguished looking, with slicked-back hair and moustache, apparently at work in his studio. What he cannot understand is that the room the painter is standing in is full of paint pots with great daubs of paint on them, that the floor has daubs of paint across it too, that there are lots of different brushes resting in white spirit, that the painter is wearing a paint-spattered smock, but that, without soiling it in any way, he’s working on a blank, spotless canvas, and he’s using a cutter to make vertical slashes, nothing more, vertical slashes. Chii-Teen suddenly becomes very excited, considering the possibility of a body without a mind, the possibility that the studio, the smock, and all the dense mass of painting materials could be a body that has been separated from the pure mind, Cartesian, fleshless, I,e. the blank canvas to which the painter is applying the cutter to.
This passage establishes a hierarchy of realities: the character in the fictional present looking at a two-dimensional image of the past (and, in turn, the reader apprehending fictional reality on the page). It illustrates a shift in context, as the slashes in the canvas, which clearly would have been meaningful to the artist making them, become unknowable to Chii-Teen. And there’s a fleeting sense of hidden order.
The thing is that, for every glimpse of a deeper meaning to reality in Nocilla Dream, there’s a suggestion that what we sense is illusion. The connections in the novel are those of globalisation: not necessarily visible from the ground, but neither indicative of a meaningful structure. Reading Nocilla Dream is the experience of a novel – like the world it depicts – without a centre: slot the pieces together as you will, but what you end up with is no more stable than one of those fragments.
Elsewhere
Read more views of Nocilla Dream at 1streading’s Blog, Workshy Fop, and minor literaure[s].
Book details (Foyles affiliate link)
Nocilla Dream (2006) by Agustín Fernández Mallo, tr. Thomas Bunstead (2015), Fitzcarraldo Editions paperback
19th April 2016 at 9:30 am
A great reading of one of my favourite books of last year. It was some of the small really touching human interactions that jumped out at me amongst all the meanderings , loneliness ,loss and trying to find a place in a random world.
19th April 2016 at 11:54 pm
I must put aside a little time for this soon (I do have it). It does sound like the type of literature that holds appeal for me lately.
21st April 2016 at 11:12 am
Yes, putting aside time – if only it were that easy 😉 Very keen to do that myself, but I might have to wait a while…
25th April 2016 at 12:40 pm
Thanks for the link. An interesting review of a fascinating book – another one I was disappointed didn’t make it onto the Man Booker International list. I love your idea of a hierarchy of realities.
1st July 2016 at 6:46 pm
Do you know if they’re publishing the rest of the trilogy? I’m a bit reluctant to jump aboard when the others may never be translated. Otherwise, it sounds very good as one would expect from Fitzcarraldo.
2nd July 2016 at 6:55 pm
Hi Max. Yes, they are: ‘Nocilla Experience’ is currently down to be published in November. Must say, I am curious as to what sort of trilogy it’s going to be. I’m certainly not expecting a straightforward linear sequence.
8th July 2016 at 6:09 pm
Good news David, thanks.