Carlos Maleno – författare

At a New Year’s Eve party, a dead woman turns up alive again, after passing through a mysterious post-mortem way station located on another planet, and much to the disbelief of her old flame, who interprets the night’s events with the help of his reading of Kafka. A priest is sent by the Vatican to investigate a strange development in the American cattle market: a breed of cows identical in all physical respects to human women. A man leaves his wife and flees to the north of Spain, where he meets a sickly woman in an empty café, introduces himself as Jorge Walser, and makes plans with her to disappear. Aboard a trans-atlantic cruise, a door-to-door vacuum salesman bumps into a woman who appears to be Natassja Kinski, and they swap tall tales as the ship floats them asymptotically toward world’s end. Christ turns out to be a girl who fronts a punk band. The words of such writers as Beckett, Walser, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Bolaño, Kafka, Blanchot, and Borges are characters in themselves.

The Irish Sea is a novel masquerading as a book of short stories. A meditation on the paradox of nostalgia, which always seems to pine for what never was. A fevered search for order through writing, of truth through literature, of the nodal point where life and literature intersect. A strange personal gallery curated by a razor-sharp reader and his other, unknown self.

A disquieting, haunting work, The Endless Rose begins when a one-legged woman’s manuscript is accepted by a small publishing house consisting of two friends. Stunned and excited by her writing, they invite her to visit them in the south of Spain.

The hypnotic, gut-wrenching events that follow—revolving around a brutal murder mentioned in the book’s first pages—are plunged into an atmosphere of dreams, violence, and bizarre coincidence.

Maleno has managed to distill a mash of Michel Houellebecq (who figures as a character here), Roberto Bolaño (The Endless Rose takes its title from a fictional novel mentioned in the Chilean’s posthumous masterpiece), and Enrique Vila-Matas (whose technique of textured allusion Maleno has mastered) into a strange brew that is all his own.