In all sincerity I don't have too much to say about this. The main story is a series of phone calls made by a man to a phone sex line, a husband to his mistress, a jilted lover to his ex, another guy to customer service, and an executive to a contract killer--these people of course all turn out to be interrelated in moderately diverting ways. There were creepy parts, and sad parts, and banal parts, and a chuckle or two. The other stories are negligible. ( )

Hi, This Is Conchita by Santiago Roncagliolo

I highly anticipated reading this book. The author, was previously acclaimed for his novel;, RED APRIL, which had one a distinguished award, Premio Alfaguara in 2006. The translator is the famous Edith Grossman.

The main story is Conchita which what I surmise was a long dialogue driven tale about prostitutes and their clients. What was ultimately problematic was that the various voices were indistinguishable and left the reader wondering who was talking. The characterizations behind the voices were never developed. Through the years I think the only master of a purely dialogue driven tale was the late George V.Higgins.

The other 3 stories of this collection were clearly written by a fresh new literary voice and here Roncagliolo manages to engage the reader in the brief dramas: an office celebration, a study of suicides and lastly a murder told by the deceased victim. In these short stories the author’s inventiveness and edgy use of language hold the reader’s attention and interest. ( )

This neat little collection features three short stories and a novella. They occur in a sort of magical realism that reminds me of Borges, full of coincidence and introspection. ( )

This is a collection of short stories and one longer work that could probably be categorized as a novella. The longer work is the title work and is the best of the four, although all four are good. The work were originally written in Spanish by Stantiago Roncagliolo, who lives in Barcelona, but they have been translated by Edith Grossman.

The title work is told through a series of phone dialogues. There is no narrator. The only thing the reader is given is the dialogue. Each chapter is a different conversation from one of four phone numbers. The conversations seem unrelated at first but they begin to interweave as the story moves forward. Eventually, the author draws the reader into an elaborate, murderous plot.

The other three stories also deal with death or at least growing older. Our own mortality and the absurdity of it is a major theme of the entire collection. Each of the other three stories is inventively told and unique compared to the rest of the collection. The first of the three, "Despoiler," is about a woman who loathes growing older and is forced by her coworkers to dress up for Carnival to celebrate her fortieth birthday. "Butterflies with Pins" is a reminiscence of people who have committed suicide. The final story in the collection, "Passenger Beside You," is about what being dead is like.

As morbid as they are, these stories are humorous and absurd. I enjoyed reading them and found them so engrossing that I read the entire collection in a day. In some ways, they could be compared to Vonnegut's works in that they are filled with dark humor that is at times hilarious. However, they are much more modern than Vonnegut and speak as much to our twenty-first century disconnectedness as to our impending doom. This is a very enjoyable, humorous, and macabre read. ( )

Hi, This Is Conchita breathe fresh air to my Early Reviewers experience.

Santiago Roncagliolo's wry and quasi-comic collection of interwoven stories detail the tenuous links between social alienation and the enveloping loneliness that our society's constant hookup, in this case the telephone, instigate.

Although in translation, Roncagliolo's characters come alive, sometimes comically so, so effortlessly in the reader's mind. Indeed, the interlinked characters that inhabit the pages of the novella and each other's existences in oft dramatic, heartbreaking, and always futile ways pull us in so resolutely. ( )