The Things We’ve Seen is composed of three sections. The first is told by a writer narrator who feels as though he could be the author, who has been sent to an island off the coast of Spain which at one point was a prison in the Spanish Civil War. This narrator then travels to Uruguay and then New York. The second section is told by a different narrator, who claims to have been the fourth astronaut to have been on the famous moon landing expedition, the one who took photos and thus never appears in the history books. This section is set in the States, New York and Florida. The final section is set in Normandy, and explicitly references Sebald, as the female narrator goes walking, retracing the steps of a journey she took with a former lover who may or may not be the astronaut or may or may or not be the writer.
The text is dense and threaded with innumerable deviations. Mallo’s erudition is worn on his sleeve. It makes for an exhausting read, and there is a sense that the writer cannot resist the lure of a rabbit hole, although this might also be the novel’s charm. Where all this leads is hard to discern. One of the stranger elements of the novel from a Uruguayan perspective, in a sequence which incorporates the Palacio Salvo, possibly Santa Catalina, and Cabo Polonio, is the writer’s wilful misrepresentation of the real. There is no train to Cabo, but the narrator takes a train most of the way there. There is also no five star hotel there, with a swimming pool, but the narrator stays in one. Quite what all this means escapes me, but it is disconcerting and inevitably places a question mark over everything we read. Were the photos in Sebald’s books really taken from a car? Whilst the 4th astronaut is clearly a conceit, Mallo’s divergence from facts that most readers would not be able to research or know feels like a next stage post modern device, particularly when so much of the novel’s weight is carried by the details the book recounts.
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