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A review by chramies
Larva: A Midsummer Night's Babel by Julián Ríos
4.0
Big-time textuality
This book is called LARVA: Midsummer Night’s Babel, and it’s by Julian Rios. And boy is it weird. The text itself is on right-hand pages only, with footnotes (so to speak) on the left hand pages. The text and notes bounce around through several languages - English, Spanish, Catalan, French, German, Russian - making crossborderal and crossreferencing puns to severely disrail what essentially is a "Don Juan in London" story. I am not sure what the value or use of this is, but why should I be? Occasionally the sustained puns don’t work, when they lapse into essentially being crossword clues: like the inexplicable noisy nun with a pot on her head, which is a crossword clue in Catalan: ‘sor’ (nun) + ‘olla’ (pot) = ‘sorolla’ (noise). The joy of a book like this is spotting the linkages before they arrive, when you just know the author is going to pull a fast one out of the hat somehow; like Kim Newman’s shot-down-airship scene in The Bloody Red Baron where the reader is sure - and is not to be disappointed - that Newman is going to use the Lakehurst Hindenburg disaster footage. Somewhere. What else I hope to get from LARVA I cannot imagine. The act of translating it from the original Spanish must have been terrifying in itself, but there is a note saying that the original and translated forms speak ‘roughly the same language’.
This book is called LARVA: Midsummer Night’s Babel, and it’s by Julian Rios. And boy is it weird. The text itself is on right-hand pages only, with footnotes (so to speak) on the left hand pages. The text and notes bounce around through several languages - English, Spanish, Catalan, French, German, Russian - making crossborderal and crossreferencing puns to severely disrail what essentially is a "Don Juan in London" story. I am not sure what the value or use of this is, but why should I be? Occasionally the sustained puns don’t work, when they lapse into essentially being crossword clues: like the inexplicable noisy nun with a pot on her head, which is a crossword clue in Catalan: ‘sor’ (nun) + ‘olla’ (pot) = ‘sorolla’ (noise). The joy of a book like this is spotting the linkages before they arrive, when you just know the author is going to pull a fast one out of the hat somehow; like Kim Newman’s shot-down-airship scene in The Bloody Red Baron where the reader is sure - and is not to be disappointed - that Newman is going to use the Lakehurst Hindenburg disaster footage. Somewhere. What else I hope to get from LARVA I cannot imagine. The act of translating it from the original Spanish must have been terrifying in itself, but there is a note saying that the original and translated forms speak ‘roughly the same language’.