2.5
The Night
ByPublisher Description
For readers who love Bolaño, a new voice of Latin American fiction, winner of the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize.
Recurring blackouts envelop Caracas in an inescapable darkness that makes nightmares come true. Real and fictional characters, most of them are writers, exchange the role of narrator in this polyphonic novel. They recount contradictory versions of the plot, a series of femicides that began with the energy crisis. The central narrator is a psychiatrist who manipulates the accounts of his friend, an author writing a book titled The Night; and his patient, an advertising executive obsessed with understanding the world through word puzzles. The author shifts between crime fiction and metafiction, cautioning readers that the events retold are both true and manipulated. This is a political novel about the financial crisis and socio-political division in Venezuela from 2008 to 2010. The title of the book, originally also in English, is a gesture towards Chavism's failure to resist US influence. Yet, the form is unapologetically literary, a reflection on the depiction and distortion of reality through storytelling. Blanco Calderón said about the potential of language, "I am convinced that all the evil in the world begins in them: in words" (Caracas, 2010).
Recurring blackouts envelop Caracas in an inescapable darkness that makes nightmares come true. Real and fictional characters, most of them are writers, exchange the role of narrator in this polyphonic novel. They recount contradictory versions of the plot, a series of femicides that began with the energy crisis. The central narrator is a psychiatrist who manipulates the accounts of his friend, an author writing a book titled The Night; and his patient, an advertising executive obsessed with understanding the world through word puzzles. The author shifts between crime fiction and metafiction, cautioning readers that the events retold are both true and manipulated. This is a political novel about the financial crisis and socio-political division in Venezuela from 2008 to 2010. The title of the book, originally also in English, is a gesture towards Chavism's failure to resist US influence. Yet, the form is unapologetically literary, a reflection on the depiction and distortion of reality through storytelling. Blanco Calderón said about the potential of language, "I am convinced that all the evil in the world begins in them: in words" (Caracas, 2010).
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Night Reviews
2.5
“Me siento estafada. Entre a esta historia porque decían que hablaba de la situación de Venezuela y no es ni cerca eso, mas bien la historia es una forma de que el escritor hable de sus propias obsesiones tratando de ocultarlas detrás de las obsesiones de sus personajes...los cuales ni de cerca estan bien construidos.
Me encanta la meta ficción, los libros sobre libros, pero por muchos momentos parece más tratado de la teoría literaria que una obra de ficción. Pudo funcionar, de hecho hay partes que son bien interesantes, pero el escritor estaba más enfocado en hacernos saber que tan versado esta en la lingüística y la literatura que en desarrollar la historia.
Probablemente queda como el peor libro que leí este año.”
“3.5 still not quite sure what I just read, but the wordplay was phenomenal”
About Rodrigo Blanco Calderon
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón is a writer and editor. He has received various awards for his stories both inside and outside Venezuela. In 2007 he was invited to join the Bogotá39 group, which brings together the best Latin American narrators under thirty-nine years old. In 2013 he was a guest writer on the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2014, his story "Emuntorios" was included in Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America, volume number 46 of the prestigious magazine McSweeney's. With his first novel, The Night, he won the 2016 Paris Rive Gauche Prize, the Critics Award in Venezuela and the 2019 Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Prize. Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and translator with sixty-something books to his name. He has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Blue Peter Book Award and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among many others. He lives in London, England. Noel Hernández González is a writer and translator. Originally from Spain, he lives in Norwich, England.
Other books by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon
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