Starred review from June 21, 2021
Spanish writer Serena debuts with a stunning portrait of a Roberto Bolaño–esque writer who strikes literary gold while facing a terminal lung disease. Like Bolaño’s alter ego in The Savage Detectives, Peruvian-born writer Ricardo Funes works at a series of campgrounds in coastal Spain while in his 20s. Fernando Vallés, a successful 30-something writer, visits and befriends Funes at Castelldefels, where Funes has gained a reputation for getting into heated debates over Latin American literature, but hasn’t published much himself. “It’s strange to think how forsaken he was back then,” Vallés recalls, “given the commotion caused, decades later, by any old manuscript found on his computer.” Vallés then spends the next two decades trekking from Barcelona to Funes’s home in Lloret, where Funes settles down with his wife, Guadalupe, and has two children. Guadalupe’s narration dramatically humanizes the now-mythical writer, describing his series of rejections, extended bouts of writer’s block, and cavalier approach to his worsening illness. Funes’s remarkable concluding monologue, which features a nested story invoking Borges’s “The South,” recalls his surprising and bittersweet success with heartbreaking depth, as he ramps up his productivity in order to leave a legacy for his family. This is a wonder.
August 15, 2021
A tale of artistic dedication inspired by the life of Roberto Bola�o. The first novel in English translation by the Spanish-born author Serena isn't strictly a roman � clef about Bola�o. For one thing, its hero, Ricardo Funes, is Peruvian, not Chilean. But the arc of Funes' life bears a strong resemblance: an early hand-to-mouth literary apprenticeship in Mexico, a later move to Spain, then an explosion of global success until his career was cut short by illness. Here, Funes' story is told by three narrators. Fernando, a fellow writer, recalls Funes from his early days in Mexico's "negacionismo" literary movement that thumbed its nose at the literary mainstream. Funes' wife, Guadalupe, remembers their courtship in Spain and his yearslong efforts to balance his ambitions with marriage and parenthood. And Funes himself concludes with his own moody contemplation on his career. In each case, the prevailing theme is uncompromising commitment to artistic ideals, to the point where Fernando's descriptions of the writer are nearly Christlike: "He held himself with the gravitas befitting a liturgy: his sandaled feet were planted firmly in the mud...." This sometimes gets repetitive and hagiographic, but Serena is also alert to details that color and complicate Funes' obsessive character: his determination to woo Guadalupe (a megaphone is involved), his close critical attention to porn films, his needing to email manuscript instructions to his editor even as he nears death. And Serena channels his observations about creativity into elegant sentences (via Whittemore's translation) that evoke the storm-clouded intensity of Bola�o's prose in books like 2666. (This is the first of two companion novels by Serena; the forthcoming Atila is about the Spanish writer Aliocha Coll.) A meditative tribute to perseverance and literary integrity.
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