the things we’ve seen (mallo, tr thomas bunstead)

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.

nocilla dream [agustin fernandez mallo]

Mallo’s book is one of those texts that ends up making you feel dim. In spite of the fact that it may well be created with the intention of making the reader feel smart, or at least more informed. The book is composed of about 130 short sections, few of them more than a couple of pages long. These fragments are bound together by the concept of the desert and the science of physics. The novel centres on a tree in the Nevada desert which is festooned with people’s shoes. This is the centrifugal point, as various characters find themselves returning to the tree and leaving their shoes like a kind of reliquary. The book is populated by drifters, prostitutes, an argentine devotee of Borges and several scientists, allowing Mallo to thread the book with asides from the world of physics, fragments which adorn the book rather than feeling fully integrated into its development. It might have been that my reading of Nocilla Dream suffered from the fact I was trying to digest it on a never-end bus journey to a place called Trienta y Tres (33), but much of the physics went over my head. The notes inform that Mallo is also a scientist. There’s probably something far more clinical and precise in the novel than I was capable of grasping; at times it felt like a highly readable but slightly whimsical collection of fragments that never quite added up to the sum of its parts; another entrant in the novel-as-blog category.