In September 1933, the Peruvian Rubber Company delivers nineteen indigenous people from the Amazon to businessman Amado Dam, intended for Argentina's first Ethnographic Theme Park. Unexpected among the human cargo is an artefact harbouring a sloth with a fascinating yet terrifying secret: the ability to create erotically explosive telepathic connections between people. What ensues is a raucous satire of men's fear of women's bodies, of the illusion of logic in the structures of so-called civilisation, and the way class and race obscure identities when the observer is a man with power.
In The National Telepathy , Roque Larraquy, one of the most original voices in contemporary Argentinian literature, brings us a literary high-wire act, an over-the-top comic grotesque about atrocity. This shocking, bizarre, funny, imaginative novel lays all-too-bare the secret longings and not-so-secret machinations of a social class that will stop at nothing in order to stay on top.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"The National Telepathy is a graphic, acerbic work of satirical science fiction unlike anything you're likely to have ever read." -The Skinny
"An emotive romp through colonial incompetence and male sexual anxiety... Larraquy shifts from satire to tragedy to hallucination with ease... One to return to." -Leviathan
"Resonances with Argentine history emerge from a hallucinatory and furiously humorous gaze." -Pagina/12
"[...] this truly magnificent novel exudes intelligence, humor, cynicism, cruelty." -Ignacio Echevarria
"With this novel Larraquy once again treads a fascinating path, with masterful handling of language and the creation of visual scenes that linger in the reader's memory. And he does it, moreover, with a story that is at once intriguing, amusing and tremendously dark." -Lector salteado
"The narrative intelligence and political power of this novel play out in its duplicity, visible in the continuous articulation of apparently contrary elements. Reality is resolved into fantasy (and vice versa), anthropology into magical thinking, caricature into monstrosity, laughter into fright, and fright into denunciation." -Revista El Diletante
"This is a book full of holes, fragmentary, formed of silences, whose central story, like a blind spot, is fragmented and seems to occur elsewhere, a beyond where the alliances between science, occultism and power mark a continuity that runs from the Lombroso-inspired experiments of the Infamous Decade to the paranoid vigilance of the self-styled Liberating Revolution." -Infobae
"It is Larraquy's structures and prose decisions that make reading it a disconcerting, unmistakably literary experience. The apparent simplicity of the style hides ironic twists of various kinds (political, historical, anthropological, literary, psychological, linguistic), while something essential seems to be in flight, irreducible to meaning. The result is a highly entertaining book, though ultimately desolate, and abrupt in its own way." -El Espanol
"Between the private and the public, the mind and the body, the city and the jungle, fiction and document, this scientistic novel contemplates and discusses the politics of communication and the modes of accessing intimacy. It crosses the political tradition of Argentine literature with the fantastic, renewing them as it does so." -Revista Otra Parte
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Praise for Roque Larraquy
"Who the devil is this Roque Larraquy? His first book seems like an artifact written with four hands-amid laughter and hidden from everyone-by Jorge Luis Borges and Witold Gombrowicz. Or maybe not Gombrowicz, but Virgilio Pinera. Or maybe not Borges, but Villiers de L'Isle-Adam adapted by Paul Valery (did you know Valery spent his youth digging up skulls to make calculations?). What is certain is that this truly magnificent novel exudes intelligence, humor, cynicism, cruelty. Cold passion with unsettling-and unexpectedly moving-effects." -Ignacio Echevarria
"In spite of having all the necessary ingredients for a historical novel (the clinic, sordid and suburban; the positivist, anthropometric delusions), it's not a historical novel; in spite of possessing, at first glance, the traits that generally mark 'realistic fiction,' (the cross between conceptual art, spectacle, and biopolitics; the gray areas of death, sickness and animalism as thresholds of humanity), something in its tone subjects the reality to a process of distancing treating it as a foreign body-alien-neither completely alive nor completely dead." -Diego Peller, Bazar Americano
"Larraquy spent seven years writing his first book . . . and another three passed before the appearance of his second. We don't know how long it will take him to publish his next one, but we intuit that there will be a third and a fourth, because in what we've seen of his work up to now there is a discernible literary project-a project that's difficult to define, for which terms like 'story,' 'novel,' or 'poetry' are insufficient."-Maximiliano Tomas_, La Nacion_
PRAISE FOR ComemadreFinalist for the National Book Award 2018 for TranslationLonglisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2020LitHub Ultimate Best Books of 2018, Best Fiction of 2018 in Huffington Post, World Literature Today's Notable Translations of 2018Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award 2019
"Shuttling between B-movie horror and exceedingly dark comedy, the novel is somehow both genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page-a wickedly entertaining ride." -Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Grotesque, outrageous, and insanely funny, [Comemadre ] has almost no equal in literature." -BOMB
"Sad, funny, and pitch-perfect." -World Literature Today
"The prose is distilled but rich-like dark chocolate." -Chicago Tribune
"Through his callous, narcissistic narrators, Larraquy interrogates the ethics of art and science, and the inhumanity we sanction in the name of intellectual achievement. Slyly funny and viscerally affecting, in a fluid translation by Heather Cleary, Comemadre is the medicine-meets-art horror story of my dreams." -Huffington Post
"The absurd is planted and buried throughout Comemadre, creating a sense of constant doubt and uncertainty. The writing is sparse and evocative, even as it takes considerable risks. The effect accomplishes a great deal in short spaces." -Full Stop
"Comemadre creates a full circle of the grotesqueries humans inflict upon one another in pursuit of immortality. [...] Read Larraquy to experience a strange waking dream from which there is no escape." -Arkansas International
"It's a brief novel, but its impact is massive." -Vol. 1 Brooklyn __
"A mutilated novel about the art of mutilating bodies." -Book Post
"In this dark, dense, surprisingly short debut novel by the Argentinian author, we're confronted with enough grotesqueries to fill a couple Terry Gilliam films and, more importantly, with the idea that the only real monsters are those that are formed out of our own ambition." -The Millions __
"Comemadre is a powerful critique of our administered, bureaucratic world, full of petty men wielding power with impunity." -Three Percent
"Layered without growing dense, the book is crisply comic, scenes punctuated like punchlines. That it all happens within a mere 130 pages is a sort of magic trick-the dizzying kind where a body gets sawed in half." -The A.V. Club
"Reading Roque Larraquy's excellent and twisted novel Comemadre is an exercise in duality: mind and body, present and past, science and art." -New Letters
"A deeply unnerving and morbidly fascinating novel." -Booklist
"Larraquy ventures into the gothic here, only to push beyond it into an even more disquieting realm of obsession, transformation, and the monstrous unknown."-Words Without Borders
"Funny, grotesque and smart." -Brazos Bookstore
"The gruesome content is handled with an absurdist touch." -Publishers Weekly
"A concise family saga by way of Dennis Cooper by way of a stress nightmare; it's also eminently readable." -Vol. 1 Brooklyn __
"[Comemadre ] spins old unreliable narrator techniques into a freshly comic and grotesque examination of the various ways that we try to justify the unjustifiable." -Barrelhouse
"Comemadre has wit in excess, spilling out over the pages, like an army of red ants, or the pools beneath a guillotine." -Fanzine __
"A masterpiece in regards to dark comedy." -Call Me [Brackets]
"A strange, wild story-slash-philosophical-meander along the lines of art, life, love, and death." -Remezcla __
"One of the most bizarre, darkly comic and fascinating books that I've read this year." -Beyond the Epilogue
"I love Comemadre. But here I am, days after reading, still asking myself what kind of book it is. Is it humor? Horror? Is it about art? Science? Philosophy? One thing is certain: it is just the kind of book that you'll want to recommend to your friends over and over again, and here I am, still doing it!"__ -Samanta Schweblin
"Like a beloved B movie, this is the campy horror show all my fellow sickos have been waiting for." -Keaton Patterson
"Larraquy has written a perfect novel: spare, urgent, funny, original, and infused with wonderfully subtle grace. I neglected my domestic duties to devour it." -Elisa Albert
"Moving from a sanatorium at the beginning of the twentieth century in which the doctors decide to use their patients as fodder for a deadly experiment, to an artist at the beginning of the twenty-first who pushes the fleshy manipulations of Chris Burden and Damien Hirst to a new extreme, Comemadre is a raucous and irreverent philosophical meditation on the relationship of the body to science and to art. Walking a line between parody and critique, this is a grotesquely funny and powerful book." -Brian Evenson
"Comemadre is one of the wildest and most disturbing novels I've read. With a language that dissects the world while describing it, Roque Larraquy constructs a dark fable about the annihilation of the body, about perversions of art and science. Heather Cleary's magnificent translation does justice to this extravagant gem-composed like a Hieronymus Bosch diptych that sets us before the monsters of unleashed reason." -Daniel Saldana Paris
"Comemadre is a sensory experience: images repeat, 'confession' has a smell, and obsession feels palpable. The two narrative threads within this wildly strange and perversely humorous novel map the expansive life of the mind, the drive to make a mark on history, and the impact of transgressions in art and science. If a Dali painting could speak, it would tell us this violently charming tale of ants marching in perfect circles and bodies pushed beyond the limits of the possible." -Elizabeth Willis, Avid Bookshop
"Two distinct narratives, ultimately linked yet set 102 years apart, combine to grotesque and lasting effect. Larraquy writes fantastically and, however unlikely it may seem given its obsessive subjects, with considerable humour. The same unsettling, disquieting feeling one might be left with after engaging, say, Georges Bataille's The Story of the Eye or fellow Argentinean author Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream is present in spades. Comemadre never flinches, however much its readers inevitably must. Comemadre lures, bedevils, and ultimately enamors-distending reality (and decency) in the process. Feral fiction at its finest, Larraquy's Comemadre is beach reading if you inexplicably find yourself marooned with Piggy, Jack, Ralph, and the rest of Golding's deserted island boys." -Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books
"Part horror, part dark comedy, part philosophy." -Unabridged Bookstore
Roque Larraquy (Buenos Aires, 1975) is the author of the novels La comemadre (2011), nominated for the USA National Book Awards (2018), the National Translation Book Award (2018) and the Dublin Literary Award (2020); Informe sobre ectoplasma animal (2014), a book illustrated by visual artist Diego Ontivero; and The National Telepathy, chosen as one the best ten books in Spanish of 2020 by The New York Times , and so far translated into Portuguese, English and French. Until 2022 Larraquy was the inaugural director of the BA in Creative Writing at the Universidad Nacional de Las Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Frank Wynne is a literary translator. Born in Ireland, he moved to France in 1984 where he discovered a passion for language working as a bookseller in Paris. He began translating literature in the late 1990s before deciding to devote himself to this full time. He has translated works by Michel Houellebecq, Frederic Beigbeder, Ahmadou Kourouma, Boualem Sansal, Claude Lanzmann, and Almudena Grandes. His work has earned him several awards, including the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Premio Valle Inclan. Most recently, his translation of Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes was shortlisted for the Man Booker International 2018. In 2022 his translation of The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter won the Dublin Literary Award.
