Fernando A. Flores

A collection of stories set mostly in the Rio Grande valley of south Texas, populated by punk bands and performance artists with modest aspirations. Flores writes sympathetically of misfits and fuckups, the unheralded and the unconventional, missed chances and patient perseverance. Punk is essentially an attitude, a combination of dissent and desire that takes various forms, depending on where you are. The Tex-Mex punk atmosphere conjured by Flores’ simple, straightforward prose is an indictment of the bullshit, and a affirmation for those who will not give in.… (mere)

A surreal run about a blasted and claustrophobic maze situated astride the Texas-Mexican border introduces Bellacosa, an aging widower mourning his lost wife and child around decade earlier, whose pursuit of a MacGuffin of 7900 rig for his patron and a search for his estranged brother, propels him through a course including a dinner of illegally filtered (artificially created) exotic animals, head hunters, viscous underworld figures, and the eponymous critter, totem of a once lost but now returned people. Meals and music and Olmec heads form a recurring chorus.… (mere)

I've wanted to read this ever since I read the title in my report--and Flores did not disappoint. Perhaps not as totally bonkers as I expected, but somehow that made it work even better. It's more fantastic than Robin Sloan's [b:Sourdough|33916024|Sourdough|Robin Sloan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1490804609l/33916024._SX50_.jpg|51600167] but only because the world is slightly different than ours--though realistically so. Realistically enough that I was a bit horrified when I read his description of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, because it sounds much more plausible than a wall.

Also...I think would like a Trufflepig for a pet. Possibly dreams and all, but I’d have to reread the book to be sure on that point.

The language was beautiful overall, though there were a couple places where it felt a bit overwritten...like the very first page, on which Bellacosa "stomped down hard and fine orange dust lifted and formed a ghost in his own image, eager to dance or play cards." Um...what? My brain had to grapple with the idea of a dust cloud in someone's image. Even in a book smacking of magical realism, that didn't quite make sense to me--not least because, as I went on, this kind of unlikely situation and the flowery last phrase of my quote were not typical of the rest of the book.

Flores's environments in southern Texas and northern Mexico are so realistically described that the atmosphere is almost palpable, even the parts that are clearly more on the fantastic side of the divide. That feast of filtered animals--setting aside the disgust that might go with reviving an extinct species only to kill them for food--was delicious.

Also nice was that the women characters had wonderful, colorful personalities even if they weren’t main characters. Fortune tellers, dinner guests and illegal feast emcees, artists and musicians daylighting as waitresses, even the dream-versions of Bellacosa’s wife and daughter felt rounded and interesting as characters in their own right instead of simply as props. No gratuitous sex/love between the main character and inappropriately younger women. Hallelujah!

Despite juggling many moving parts--noir-esque, realistic, fantastic, mystical--Flores managed to bring everything together in a satisfyingly and possibly interpretable conclusion.

It's a bit of a slow start, but I do recommend this book for anyone with a little patience and an appreciation of the weird/magical realistic.

Quote Roundup

p. 36) One more oddball overwriting moment:
The sky grimaced like an old retiree counting change.
The sky grimaced? What is that even supposed to mean?

p. 103) “I’m not a member of the Government Daily or anything like that. I’m a journalist, like R. Murrow, abiding by the Truth-perception standards of the day. … We will have to eat and try everything they serve, no matter how disgusting it is in reality. A high-class affair, in other words.”
Come for the creepy Government vs. “Truth-perception” commentary in our post-factual world, stay for the .01% barbs.

p. 200) “…Sopo had to climb their volcano god Huixtepeltinico and rescue what academics from a certain era referred to as ‘el cerdo reptil’—a term first coined by the Mexican historian Dr. Lazara Carranza, somewhat crudely translated by himself as “the Trufflepig.”
Very crudely. Even I, without a scrap of Spanish beyond “hola” and “gato”, can tell that “el cerdo reptile” has nothing to do with the words “truffle” or “pig”. Probably part of the humor.

p. 216) vocab: capsicum: pepper / tropical American herbs and shrubs of the nightshade family. The context is “they walked into the capsicum fog”, so I can’t say I’m any more enlightened than I was before…

p. 218) No idea why the TV has been called a replica instead. I can kind of understand how “filtering” might be derived from scientific process that we don’t understand, but there aren’t really hints of what makes a “replica” different from a TV.

p. 243-244) The Trufflepig was beginning to disturb Bellacosa. Then, strangely, the creature gave him some kind of assurance. He felt that if a Trufflepig could happen, that anything could happen, and Bellacosa began thinking of it as a kind of Tex-Mex platypus.
Yes, please, I’ll take one.

p. 277) Here’s where we find out how there are two boarder walls and how a third can even be considered: Instead of building a vertical wall up from the ground, a moat has been dug down, with 90-degree walls on either side of the Rio Grande. Perfect for border agents to stand and snipe off anyone trying to cross.
… (mere)

“It wasn’t some monster or cheap science-fiction alien conquest, but people creating all the horror, enslaving one another at all cost in a world where more and more syndicates and absolute power reigned supreme.”

“In this world, it is only men who are guilty of anything, men of flesh and bones and gravity and sins.”

South Texas. Near future. There are now three border walls and major food shortages. Drugs are legal but there is a thriving trafficking business, in ancient artifacts and shrunken heads. Mexican gangs have kidnapped scientists and have forced them into bringing back extinct animals for food and entertainment, for the wealthy. This includes the mystical truffle-pig. Thrown into this mix, is Esteban Bellacosa, a middle-aged Mexican-American businessman, who somehow gets caught in between warring factions. This is a highly inventive first novel, well-written and finely crafted. This is an author to keep an eye on.… (mere)