Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

This was one very confusing novel...

In a city which may or may not exist, a series of viruses show up every few years (sometimes they seem to disappear for a while but they always come) and when that happens, the city hides in their houses and hopes for the best and only a team of workers goes around town and onto the tunnels - the first so they can drag the dead away; the latter so they can kill the rats who carry the virus.

The time of my reading of this novel was weird - but the novel is not part of the current crop of virus-related novels - it was initially written in 2016 and the translation came out in November, 2019.

The city is not one we know but the people in it talk about cities we know about so one have to wonder about the time (and place). The viruses who decimate the city are just part of the story of ruin - the city seems to exist to gamble and a sport which you cannot identify as it is a mix of a lot of things (real and imaginary) seems to be the only thing that anyone cares about. And in a room, in the narrator's house, there is a stone which distorts reality.

Tizano uses short chapters (100+ in a 150 pages book) and long sentences (especially in the parts that may or may not be true) and flips between memories, stone-related scenes and virus-related scenes to create an almost dizzying kaleidoscope of stories which seem to be leading to finding out why the virus is always coming back and what the stone is. Until we reach chapter 100 and suddenly the chapters start having negative numbers (starting from -1 and going down -- or at least this is how they looked in the ebook) and things go from weird to weirder. I thought I knew where the novel was going until that reversal - I still think that the end is connected to the same questions and to the question of reality but it got too disjointed and weird for me.

The writing is beautiful and even if nothing makes sense, it almost hypnotizes you. And without that last part, I actually enjoyed it. Now I am not sure what really happened or why (although I can see some connections, it almost feels like an add-on to pad the number of pages...) and I just wish the novel had stopped earlier. At least we learn why the title of the novel is Jakarta (and it is partially because of the city with that name and partially not).

It is a first novel and it may appeal more to people who like modernist novels. I am not sorry I read it but it is definitely not my style.… (mehr)