Nocilla Lab By Agustín Fernández Mallo
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El desastre de Chiang Mai durante un viaje a Tailandia fue la azarosa oportunidad para que Agustín Fernández Mallo volcara en un relato tripartito sus experiencias con esa cosa tan extraña llamada Mundo. Nocilla Lab es el cierre lógico y multidisciplinar del Proyecto Nocilla.
Una road movie autorreferencial y visionaria, inquietante, donde un hombre y una mujer buscan poner en marcha el Proyecto, una excusa para hurgar en sus sueños y en su propia relación. Un certero relato del arte de crear, de escribir, de imaginar. El trayecto acaba en una antigua prisión en la que un hombre se enfrenta a otro, con el suspense y la tensión de un thriller, un hombre contra sí mismo en un final original y sorprendente.
Como un demiurgo disfrazado de DJ ficcional, Agustín Fernández Mallo transforma cuanto encuentra a su paso en una nueva realidad, la creada por su mesa de mezclas, convirtiendo lo paradójico de la existencia en una verdadera poética. Pura física elemental. Nocilla Lab
An Italian restaurant – which in Italy set off a new wave of trendy experimental cooking, finally opens a branch in London.
I decide to visit.
The antipasto course is a Nutella sandwich.
For the second I am served a Ferrero Rocher.
The main course – the culmination of the meal – may be brilliant, and a review on Squaremeal says it is (albeit by a critic well known to be biased in favour of restaurants interpreting food from non-English speaking chefs); however based on the first two courses my appetite and appreciation for the chef has already been ruined and I cannot finish the meal or share my thoughts on Squaremeal.
My Nutella themed review of Nocilla Dream
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My Ferrero Rocher themed review of Nocilla Experience
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
A review of Nocilla Lab
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
(NB – Nocilla is a Spanish version of Nutella) 0374222835 Everything in this world resembles something else more or less, so we can always find some analogies…
And every single thing in some way are always different from the other things so we can distinguish them after all…
Isn’t it a paradox?
…it would be monstrous to happen upon something absolutely new, it would be nightmarish and unbearable, just as two absolutely identical beings would be, and so we look for arguments to take us beyond this paradox, I love paradoxes, or I don’t love them, that’s stupid, it’s just that without them life wouldn’t exist and the planet would be a wasteland, so, simply, paradoxes are, they exist, full stop…
Nocilla Lab begins as a common travelogue and it is unmotivatedly repetitive… Similar to other travelogues it is about going from place to place… And differing from other travelogues it is even more boring…
Therefore, comparing to the previous parts of the trilogy, Nocilla Lab is a letdown. But when Agustín Fernández Mallo starts decomposing his narration replacing actuality with schizoid delirium the story simply turns preposterous…
“It is to be supposed that the day when more plastic surgery operations take place than appendectomies, planet earth will ascend to the status of fashion object.”
Sometimes wisdom just turns into inanity. 0374222835 Nocilla Lab, originally published in 2009, is the third in a trilogy of novels from Agustín Fernández Mallo, brought into English by translator Thomas Bunstead, following Nocilla Dream (2006) and Nocilla Experience (2008).
The book is from the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions. This is their 22nd work of fiction, of which I've read 16, although two of the 'missing' ones are the first two parts of this trilogy.
Copyright permitted, a more informative translation of the title into English might be Nutella Lab, as Nocilla is a rival brand of chocolate and hazelnut spread sold in Italy and Spain, and that gives an idea of the playful pop culture that co-exists with serious literature as an inspiration for the author's highly innovative work. As he explained to 3AM Magazine (https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/or-on...
I create a whole network of metaphors which deal with the world of consumption and industry, the world of science, high and low culture etc., and I believe that this way of mixing materials in my particular case has been more inspired by conceptual art than by literature proper.[*Yes Thomas Bernhard again- surely the most important writer of the 2nd half of the 20th Century]. adding later WG Sebald (one of my reference points and has been for the last ten years) and, elsewhere, Italo Calvino and Giorgio Manganelli, amongst others.
However, of course there are authors who have influenced me, but you’ll be surprised because they are very classical authors. For example, I’m very interested in mystic literature (St John of the Cross), “low intensity” North American postmodernism (Don DeLillo), central European literature (Thomas Bernhard*), Latin American (Borges, Cortázar), Spanish (Juan Benet).
This novel begins with a 71 page (it starts on page 11), single sentence stream of thoughts from a first person narrator, also called Agustín Fernández Mallo and also author of two previous books called Nocilla Lab and Nocilla Experience. For example from the first pages:
... the only men I’ve ever been interested in are those who have struck me as both entirely different from and better than me, those I consider ‘cases’, ‘clinical cases’, as the writer Emil Cioran had it when discussing a class of pathologically brilliant person, and it’s in this regard, the ‘clinical case’ regard, that I have always hoped to find in someone those same things that set the Replicant apart, the perfect being, existing on the edge of humanness, not beyond that edge but certainly not this side of it either, exactly on the biological frontier, such thoughts are absurd given that in the end we are all more or less identical, not identical in the way, for instance, that 2 photons are identical, physics tells us photons are indistinguishable, but in the sense of ‘very much alike’, and this is why aspiring to such difference, any hope of ever becoming a ‘clinical case’ oneself, turns out to be an infantile stance, though a desire to be different from other people can still help you to take action, to progress, to work through stress and anxiety, to be, that is, alive in a sense quite different from the ‘being alive’ idea peddled by the bland Eastern philosophies, because stress promotes entropy, disorder, life, and one travels to different countries and sees there very different things flora- and fauna-wise, customs- and appearances-wise, all the things that distinguish races and cultures, and yet, sooner or later, one comes to the undeniable conclusion or formulation of what might even be a law, namely that everything, looked at in sufficient detail, is identical to its counterpart on the far side of the world: zoom in and the leaf of a scrub plant in Sardinia is the same as that of an Alaskan pine tree, the skin pores of a Sudanese person are identical to those of an Inuit, and there really is nothing between a Buddha figure in Bangkok and a statuette of Christ in Despeñaperros, Jaén, and so it is with everything, because of another law both general and true: the tourist goes abroad and identifies with the things he or she finds there only because they call to mind something familiar, something that, without being exactly the same, is somewhat the same, the Replicant from Blade Runner, and all of this has a great deal to do with what we understand by the word frontier, by the overlapping of surfaces, because it would be monstrous to happen upon something absolutely new, it would be nightmarish and unbearable, just as two absolutely identical beings would be, and so we look for arguments to take us beyond this paradox ...
The narration is something of a spiral, growing outwards and taking on more themes, but always returning to the certain familiar reference points and motifs: inter alia a bar on an island south of Sardinia very similar to a bar in the Azores (although neither he or his girlfriend has ever been to the Azores), the guitar case of a Gibson Les Paul, the last litter tray of a dead cat, a two piece bikini with a daisy print and a Paul Auster novel in Portuguese, the latter two both purchased on a trip to Las Vegas, an accident in Thailand which gave him the time to write the previous novel in the trilogy and a mysterious Project planned by him and his daisy-print bikini wearing girlfriend which they plan to complete in Sardinia.
In the novel itself, the narrator explains his preferred narrative approach (note the reference to Giorgio Manganelli, the pop culture, and the way this particular stream of thoughts returns to that bar in Sardinia):
... I have always tried to write totally amorally, like Coca-Cola, moral roots unmanifest, maybe this is why I like the US, because, like me, it’s inhabitants are uncouth, unconnected, tourists in their own lives, this is also why I am 100% with the artist John Currin when he says he only needs 10 minutes in the MoMA before he’s had his fill, any longer and his own progress as an artist Ian going to be stunted, History’s like a huge supermarket, that’s the way it ought to be viewed, yes, that’s got a ring to it, History as supermarket, I’d get a tattoo of that if I didn’t hate tattoos so much, and this method of telling stories amorally, documentarily, is not something I’ve taken from literature but from a film I happened across in the early 90s, Japanese director Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-bi, a form of narration in which the only imperative is to follow the way it’s own language breathes, an idea I then came across soon after in Giorgio Manganelli’s fascinating book Centuria and that was corroborated for me, quite a long time later, the night I met the woman now sitting across from me in a bar on the island to the south of Sardinia that bore a resemblance to a bar in the Azores,...
The second part of the novel, told in short numbered chapter, each barely a paragraph, takes on a more metafictional and sinister turn (think Tales of the Unexpected) and includes the narrator - or possibly an alter ego?, writing, or rewriting?, the first section of the novel, interspersed with some grainy photographs supposedly taken by the narrator during this part of the narrative.
The third, which follows up on the story of the 2nd, is even more fragmentary and concludes that Agustín Fernández Mallo and his Nocilla Project may never have existed, but that certain great literary works may have concocted in homage to him, citing examples from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Wittgenstein. JG Ballard and Marguerite Duras amongst others.
And the fourth, in conjunction with the artist Pere Joan, is a graphic short story involving another post-modern Spanish author, the excellent Enrique Vila-Matas.
It all adds up to a wonderful mix. His Fitzcarraldo stable mate Matthias Enard has hailed him as the most original and powerful author of his generation* in Spain (he was born in 1967) and it is interesting to compare and contrast the two: both highly literary and given to long unbroken page like sentences (Enard's masterpiece Zone is one 521 page sentence) but where as Enard is deliberately and rather anachronistically old-fashioned and cultured, Fernández Mallo's writing is infused with pop culture and a network mix of many more extraliterary materials (his words from the same 3AM interview). Both are excellent.
While this certainly can be read stand-alone, I suspect to fully appreciate it I would need to read the first two parts of the trilogy, as well as the associated film made by the author in parallel with the novels (see https://vimeo.com/6897147), which unfortunately is only available in Spanish. So 4 stars for now, but perhaps 5 when I can appreciate the Proyecto Nocilla (Nocilla Project) as a whole. 0374222835 I guess many of us have had an experience a bit like the following. You wake up one night in the middle of a dream. The dream was a jumble of things that all seemed out of order but it made sense in a dream-like way. Then you manage to go back to sleep and the dream continues. This time, it seems a bit more logical but it takes a turn towards something weird, almost Kafka-esque, and disturbing. It reaches a violent climax that jerks you awake. Then you lie there dozing, half asleep, half awake with dream-like fragments of thought flashing through your mind.
This, in essence, is what it feels like to read Nocilla Lab. And then there’s a short graphic novel at the end to finish it off.
Nocilla Lab is the third part of the Nocilla trilogy. All the books can be read on their own, but that is especially true of this final part which does not require you to read either of the first two parts: one of the main characters is the author and he explains how and when he wrote the first two parts.
The first part of the book (Automatic Search Engine) focusses on a couple, a man and a woman. It is an 80-page sentence in which several different episodes in their life are jumbled and trigger further thoughts in the narrator’s mind. It is a bit like trying to get through a maze. The narrative wanders down one path, but then suddenly turns off to another. Sometimes, it sets off into something that seems completely unrelated, hits a dead end and goes back to where it was. Often, it gets back to a point that the reader recognises and sets off again. Our protagonists seem to wander the globe preparing for their mysterious Great Project which is contained in a guitar case they carry with them.
It is confusing, but not as confusing as you might think. I found the whole thing both mesmerising and addictive. It returns to known points at just the right frequency for the reader to be able to keep some kind of orientation. You feel as if you know what is happening despite the jumble and the additional side-alleys etc..
In the second part (Automatic Engine), the same couple settle down in a strange (weird even) hotel. It would spoil things to talk about what happens, but it begins to feel very much like a horror story.
At this point, the page numbers stop but the book has not finished. Part three is Engine Fragments. The font changes, the page numbers disappear, and short paragraphs skitter around, some progressing the main theme(s) others seeming almost random.
Then, to close things, there is a short graphic novel featuring Enrique Vila-Matas on an oil rig.
Seriously, what’s not to like?!
My personal experience of the whole trilogy has been that I loved the first part (Nocilla Dream) for it’s dream-like quality and the way it circled round a tree in the Nevada desert. Part Two (Nocilla Experience) was, in some ways, more of the same, but somehow didn’t have quite the magic of the first part for me. This final part, possibly my favourite, is completely different and I read it with a smile on my face. The language (and I assume a lot of credit goes to the translator here) is very poetic and even the 80-page sentence is enjoyable at a sentence level. I really enjoyed the stories told, as well as the way they are told. I am not sure how (or even if) it all hangs together, but I am also not at all sure that “hanging together” is the point. The author is part scientist, part poet and that is evident through the books. As with a lot of poetry, the purpose isn’t necessarily for everything to make logical sense but more to create an impression and plant things in the reader’s mind. Anyone who has read many of my reviews will know that this is my favourite kind of book.
This is a trilogy I would gladly read again (and probably will at some point soon). I can appreciate that it is not everyone’s idea of fun, but I loved it. 0374222835 A Poorly Constructed Novel with Photos, Drawings, a Graphic Novel, and a Video (And Some Really Amazing Sexism)
Caveat emptor: this is not a positive review. Perhaps it's true, as the Paris Review says, that the Nocilla trilogy has catapulted Mallo to the forefront of his generation (Twitter line for the essay by Thomas Bunstead, Feb. 4, 2019), but in that case nearly any injection of the novel with a large dose of Robert Smithson... Situationism... Dadaism... poetry... science... appropriation (collage and quotes and cut-and-paste)... technology (often anachronistic)... images (almost always pixelated), and comic books would have done the same.
First (A) some remarks on the book's use of photographs, drawings, a graphic novel, and an associated video. I read this book in connection with the writingwithimages.com project, because it has so many visual elements. After that, some more negative things: (B) the book's construction, and (C) its really surprising sexism.
(This review is of the new English translation, put out by Fitzcarraldo Editions. I also want to be clear that Fitzcarraldo Editions are a spectacular press, and the translation here strikes me as pitch perfect.)
(A) The visual elements
This third and final volume of the Nocilla trilogy has three parts: I. Automatic Search Engine, II. Automatic Engine, and III. Engine Parts. I think it may be truer to the reading experience to divide it in six:
1. Automatic Search Engine, which is an 80-page run-on sentence. (Not a single sentence, as I wrote about Mathias Enard's Crossing the Zone. Not incidentally, both are translated in Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Enard has contributed to the tidal swells of praise of the Nocilla trilogy.)
2. Automatic Engine, which is 44 numbered sections, interrupted by
3. Eight pages of photographs, with words that have supposedly been typed on them.
4. The first part of Engine Parts, which is set in monospace type, as if it has been typed.
5. The second part of Engine Parts, which is a self-contained graphic novel.
6. There is also a video project, named in the book (in Notes and Credits, two pages after the end of the novel). It is on the author's website (fernandezmallo.megustaleer.com) and on Vimeo at vimeo.com/6897147.
I put it this way because these visual interruptions are more important, in the reading experience, than the three titled parts.
Images are crucial in the book and yet they are extremely carelessly done. To justify that I need to make three myopic criticisms.
A single image, of a page of the narrator's notebook, appears by itself on p. 84. There are several other references to the notebook, but no other illustrations, even though there are other passages that could make good use of reproductions, such as the measurements of the prison on pp. 105-108. The picture in question is the plan of a campsite. Inexplicably, names of the parts of the campsite are printed (not drawn) on the sketch; apparently readers aren't meant to ask themselves how that happened.
The Eight pages of photographs are introduced in the narrative just preceding them (pp. 127-29): they are pictures the narrator took and then printed out and put into his typewriter. But they're clearly pictures that have been scanned and lettered in an image processing app: the text is white on black, and too neat to be a typewriter. Again readers are not expected to be looking that closely.
The short graphic novel at the end of the book has tiny print -- too small to read comfortably -- indicating it was drawn much larger, and that the reduction wasn't anticipated.
These are small points, but they go to a systemic issue: Fernandez Mallo expects readers to think mainly about his text, and to look only carelessly and quickly at his images. That is why it can make sense to divide the book in three parts, despite the surprising and anomalous presence of photographs and a graphic novel.
(B) The narrative
There's a good summary of the major parts of this book on Goodreads, written by Paul Fulcher. However I can't agree that the combination of elements adds up to a wonderful mix. After Automatic Search Engine, the 80-page run-on sentence, the book is exceptionally carelessly assembled. Automatic Search Engine owes something to Bernhard, Beckett, Enard, and others; it's seamless and tightly recursive. The following narrative of numbered sections, Automatic Engine, follows suit in a more fragmented manner. All this is ruminative, self-reflective, and largely plotless, in the manner of any number of postmodern writers, including Krasznahorkai and Vila-Matas (who appears in the graphic novel).
But the book suddenly veers aside on p. 118, when it is revealed that the owner of a hotel has the same name as the author. From that moment onward, it reads like genre fiction. Sometimes it's like detective fiction (the narrator searches the hotel), or crime fiction (the narrator knifes his namesake), or Poe (the hotel become mysterious and sinister), or even King (roots from the other side of the Earth push up through the garden).
I don't mind collages of manners and influences, but these are not managed allusions. The pages feel improvised, and they come across as a failure of imagination. It takes concentration and a steady purpose to write 80 pages of continuous monologue. It's relatively easy to make up new mysteries and inexplicable events every couple pages. I don't think this is postmodern collage at all; I think it's a lapse in energy and resources. The short graphic novel isn't the fascinating turn into the visual world that it might have been: it's simply pasted on.
The book is badly constructed, and it doesn't represent our contemporary digital age, which is infinitely more aware of the visual and of different media.
(C) The sexism
I have difficulty understanding why the reviews I've seen don't mention the book's endemic sexism. The narrator has a female companion through most of the book. At one point he says she's brilliant, and she says great things, but she's only quoted three or four times, and most of those sentences include the word fuck. The narrator spends his days writing (he's working on the novel we're reading), but we have almost no idea what she does all day except swim and smoke. When the narrator spends time with people, we're told she doesn't speak. We're told over and over -- all the way to the very end of the novel -- that she bought a bikini with daisies on the breasts. We're told over and over that she bought new knickers every day. Piles of her knickers turn up in unexpected places. There must be fifty or more references to them.
This is head-shaking, endemic, rooted, unconscious, unironic sexism. If it were at all self-aware, in any capacity, I might want to defend it. What makes it disastrous is the continuous distraction of the fact that the implied author thinks all's well. 0374222835
(4.5) I gulped this down in two days, enjoying it immensely. Not in the mood to write a long review, so, in a nutshell: it feels as if here Mallo has mastered what he set out to do Nocilla Dream, which still had a rather clear demarcation between fiction and non-fiction (e.g. lots of cited sources to bring attention to the non-fictionality), while Nocilla Lab reads smoothly as a well-written, experimental novel, where the author’s expertise in physics serves the narrative beautifully. Unlike the first two novels, this begins with an 80-page sentence without paragraph breaks, followed by much more succinct chapters continuing the same story but now, increasingly, bordering on horror. The ending, a graphic “novel” (short story) builds on themes present earlier. Lots to mull over in this fine conclusion to the trilogy, the best of the three I would say – I might write a longer piece after some more reflection. 0374222835 'What would happen if you were in your villa one day, say a Sunday, and you went out to get your post, and the wind blew the door shut, and you'd left your key inside, and you're there in your pyjamas, nothing on your feet, and you find yourself looking in at your coffee pot, the living room table with the little porcelain statue on it, the photo of the cat on the shelves, the books you left open on the floor beside your table, where your Mac is, messages flashing up on Messenger, your coffee cup on the draining board, the bin overflowing with Coke cans, and it struck you you'd been afforded a view of your life without you in it? What would happen?'
'I'd smash the glass,' I said.
'Yeah, OK, but what else?'
I said nothing for a few seconds, then:
'OK, I don't know if I'd have the guts. For that kind of return to myself.'
3.5. The best one of the trilogy. What begins as an 80 page or so sentence in Part I then becomes a familiar Part II with short numbered chapters (but with pictures too, this time), and then at the end becomes a strange font chapter that becomes a comic book for the final ten pages or so. Mallo is now the narrator, or some form of him. Auster's A Music of Chance comes up a lot in this book (funnily at one point Mallo calls the title childish), and the second part of the book feels very Auster inspired. Think The New York Trilogy. Everything felt more focussed, at last, in this installment of the trilogy. And Mallo even addresses the previous books: 'we went to Thailand and I broke my hip and lay in a Chiang Mai hotel bed for 25 days and wrote Nocilla Dream, and then had another 5 bedridden months at home coming up with Nocilla Experience...'
Glad I read the trilogy all in one go and got it 'done with'. Mallo's The Things We've Seen looks far better, especially as it's been described as being both Sebaldian and Lynchian. 0374222835 Erg sterk einde aan een erg sterke trilogie (kind of). De heel verschillende structuur van dit boek tegenover de eerste twee stond me eerst niet erg aan (die structuur was wat me net zo aansprak in Dream en Experience) maar al snel bleek dit boek een fantastisch orgelpunt te vormen voor de serie. Wat een einde! Ik denk dat ik de laatste dertigtal pagina’s met ingehouden adem heb gelezen. 0374222835 Con este acabo de terminar la lectura de la trilogía del Proyecto Nocilla, y tengo la misma sensación que en su momento me produjo ver Koyaanisqatsi. 0374222835 I denna bok fanns det inget att hämta. 0374222835