The Nocilla trilogy is strange. It feels familiar in the way the internet does. The first two books are told in a similar style: they present about a page of text in third person about a person struggling with their relationship to something or someone—typically something, manifested through their relationship with someone. I can’t claim to understand them in any overarching or systematic way. They seem like they present a vision of our relationship to allegory and metaphor while playing in a space that feels similar to 2666, in the sense that if we can’t have a coherent narrative or present a singular story we all rally behind we can still have something. It builds on that, even though the author admits to never having read it, though there is a character who airs out his theorems on clotheslines much like a character in Bolaño’s novel airs out a geometry book on a clothesline. We spend time in both books thinking about what this means to the character and to us as readers, and I’m not really sure we get super far in a way I can set down definitively, though the experience is interesting, if not enlightening.

The last book, Nocilla Lab, is where things change. The form changes suddenly: the first part is a single 64-page sentence. I liked this part a lot, though it was challenging to read because the style of the previous books remained: nearly but not quite verse, but set in prose. I won’t spoil the rest of the book, but it plays with form and representation and metaphor in a way few pieces of media do.
There are parts I don’t like. I don’t like how most of the characters are men, how there’s a kind of universality to the phallocentrism of all the narratives, even the ones about women. I don’t like how in one case, a character offers a terrible description of a fat women after she chides him for smoking in a non-smoking area. (The author loves cigarettes more than almost anything. This comes through clearly in every book.) This character offers a page of beautiful description and metaphor and inference about how terrible this woman is, how she embodies all that is bad in humanity, &c, but does not turn his critical lens on himself and both what he was doing to prompt the rebuke and what his own behavior means in the context of what he’s discussing. Perhaps that’s kind of the point. It’s a good writer that can make me continue to read a book after I loathe a character.
These books are absolutely worth your time. ( )

A Poorly Constructed Novel, With a Poor Use of Visual Material and an Entirely Unconscious Sexism

First (A) some remarks on the book's use of photographs, drawings, a graphic novel, and an associated video. I read this book in connection with the writingwithimages.com project, because it has so many visual elements. After that, some more negative things: (B) the book's construction, and (C) its really surprising sexism.

(A) The visual elements

This third and final volume of the Nocilla trilogy has three parts: "I. Automatic Search Engine," "II. Automatic Engine," and "III. Engine Parts." I think it may be truer to the reading experience to divide it in six:

1. "Automatic Search Engine," which is an 80-page run-on sentence. (Not a single sentence, as I wrote about Mathias Enard's "Crossing the Zone." Not incidentally, both are translated in Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Enard has contributed to the tidal swells of praise of the Nocilla trilogy.)

2. "Automatic Engine," which is 44 numbered sections, interrupted by

3. Eight pages of photographs, with words that have supposedly been typed on them.

4. The first part of "Engine Parts," which is set in monospace type, as if it has been typed.

5. The second part of "Engine Parts," which is a self-contained graphic novel.

6. There is also a video project, named in the book (in "Notes and Credits," two pages after the end of the novel). It is on the author's website (fernandezmallo.megustaleer.com) and on Vimeo at vimeo.com/6897147.

I put it this way because these visual interruptions are more important, in the reading experience, than the three titled parts.

Images are crucial in the book and yet they are extremely carelessly done. To justify that I need to make three myopic criticisms.

A single image, of a page of the narrator's notebook, appears by itself on p. 84. There are several other references to the notebook, but no other illustrations, even though there are other passages that could make good use of reproductions, such as the measurements of the prison on pp. 105-108. The picture in question is the plan of a campsite. Inexplicably, names of the parts of the campsite are printed (not drawn) on the sketch; apparently readers aren't meant to ask themselves how that happened.

The Eight pages of photographs are introduced in the narrative just preceding them (pp. 127-29): they are pictures the narrator took and then printed out and put into his typewriter. But they're clearly pictures that have been scanned and lettered in an image processing app: the text is white on black, and too neat to be a typewriter. Again readers are not expected to be looking that closely.

The short graphic novel at the end of the book has tiny print -- too small to read comfortably -- indicating it was drawn much larger, and that the reduction wasn't anticipated.

These are small points, but they go to a systemic issue: Fernandez Mallo expects readers to think mainly about his text, and to look only carelessly and quickly at his images. That is why it can make sense to divide the book in three parts, despite the surprising and anomalous presence of photographs and a graphic novel.

(B) The narrative

There's a good summary of the major parts of this book on Goodreads, written by Paul Fulcher. However I can't agree that the combination of elements "adds up to a wonderful mix." After "Automatic Search Engine," the 80-page run-on sentence, the book is exceptionally carelessly assembled. "Automatic Search Engine" owes something to Bernhard, Beckett, Enard, and others; it's seamless and tightly recursive. The following narrative of numbered sections, "Automatic Engine," follows suit in a more fragmented manner. All this is ruminative, self-reflective, and largely plotless, in the manner of any number of postmodern writers, including Krasznahorkai and Vila-Matas (who appears in the graphic novel).

But the book suddenly veers aside on p. 118, when it is revealed that the owner of a hotel has the same name as the author. From that moment onward, it reads like genre fiction. Sometimes it's like detective fiction (the narrator searches the hotel), or crime fiction (the narrator knifes his namesake), or Poe (the hotel become mysterious and sinister), or even King (roots from the other side of the Earth push up through the garden).

I don't mind collages of manners and influences, but these are not managed allusions. The pages feel improvised, and they come across as a failure of imagination. It takes concentration and a steady purpose to write 80 pages of continuous monologue. It's relatively easy to make up new mysteries and inexplicable events every couple pages. I don't think this is postmodern collage at all; I think it's a lapse in energy and resources. The short graphic novel isn't the fascinating turn into the visual world that it might have been: it's simply pasted on.

The book is badly constructed, and it doesn't represent our contemporary digital age, which is infinitely more aware of the visual and of different media.

(C) The sexism

I have difficulty understanding why the reviews I've seen don't mention the book's endemic sexism. The narrator has a female companion through most of the book. At one point he says she's brilliant, and she says great things, but she's only quoted three or four times, and most of those sentences include the word "fuck." The narrator spends his days writing (he's working on the novel we're reading), but we have almost no idea what she does all day except swim and smoke. When the narrator spends time with people, we're told she doesn't speak. We're told over and over -- all the way to the very end of the novel -- that she bought a bikini with daisies on the breasts. We're told over and over that she bought new knickers every day. Piles of her knickers turn up in unexpected places. There must be fifty or more references to them.

This is head-shaking, endemic, rooted, unconscious, unironic sexism. If it were at all self-aware, in any capacity, I might want to defend it. What makes it disastrous is the continuous distraction of the fact that the implied author thinks all's well.