This intriguing debut is as much about the novelist himself as his varied assortment of often fantastical characters. Whimsical and inventive in form, Plascencia constantly shifts the narrative voice to allow each of his protagonists a slice of the action. While the resultant clamour is sometimes a tad confusing, it provides a lively counterpoint to the serious business of love and the suffering it inflicts.
Following his wife’s departure after years of tolerating his uncontrollable bed-wetting, Federico de la Fe is consumed by an almost unbearable sadness. He begins to feel that he is under constant surveillance and identifying the source as Saturn, aka Salvador Plascencia, wages a war ‘against the commodification of sadness’, with the help of EMF, a gang of hardened carnation pickers.
In order to ensure that Saturn cannot intrude on their privacy, EMF line their houses with lead and, when outside, obscure their thoughts ‘in a loop of irrelevance’. Meanwhile Saturn is distracted by his own personal problems. His girlfriend Liz has walked out and, temporarily abandoning the war on EMF, he tries to forget her by embarking on an ultimately doomed relationship with Cameroon, a woman addicted to the stings of honeybees.
Saturn may muse on conquest and display his ability to write those who displease him out of the plot (the hapless Cameroon is ‘flicked from an African cliff’), yet ultimately the novelist’s victory is meaningless as the future he longs for eludes him. With a whiff of magical realism and an impressive display of stylistic pyrotechnics, Plascencia blends fiction and reality in this highly original tale about the fragility of love and the obsession it breeds.
