(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. ( )

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… ( )

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! ( )

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.