THE TRANSENTIENTS
woman in a specific Santiago neighborhood. There’s no doubt in Tomás’ mind that “the transformation had truly occurred.” When he returns to being just himself, he searches for the woman and tries to steer her away from something he believes lies in her future. Tomás undergoes more of these “transentient” experiences, including a harrowing climb on a storm-lashed mountain and a screenwriter’s visit to the set of his movie. Each transposition becomes a detailed narrative, and together they offer links or clues in the book’s episodic puzzle of a plot. The climber is a nephew of the homeless woman; Tomás’ ex-wife is also working on the movie. The alter egos provide Tomás with an eerie version of the human attachments he sought to avoid and give the author a protagonist with a highly fluid nature. Missana, abetted by a fine translation from Powell, raises questions about identity, friendship, intimacy, and empathy while building a psychological mystery on the shifting border between realism and fantasy, “a thin membrane that threatened to tear apart at any moment.” Simenon meets García Márquez in this sly, strange, entertaining work.
Missana, Sergio Trans. by Jessica Powell McPherson & Company (256 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 16, 2021 978-1-62054-043-5 A man’s midlife crisis includes strange periods when he inhabits the lives of other people. This is the first English translation of a novel by Chilean writer Missana, who has written seven books in Spanish. The narrator is Tomás Ugarte, the creative director of a Santiago advertising agency, who seeks to restart his life as a tabula rasa ahead of his 40th birthday. He quits his job, proceeds with the final stages of divorcing his wife, and moves into a new apartment. But the normal details occupying his days fade in significance when he has a spell during which he crosses over into another life, experienced through the eyes and other senses of an old homeless
HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK
Nagamatsu, Sequoia Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.) $23.49 | Jan. 18, 2022 978-0-06-307264-0 What happens to humanity when death radically outpaces life? Scientists digging in Siberia find the body of a girl who seems to be a mix of Homo sapien and Neanderthal while also possessing genetic traits that look like starfish or octopus. She’s dressed in clothes remarkable not only for their fine needlework, but also for the fact that they’re decorated with shells from the Mediterranean. Unearthing this girl releases a virus that destroys human organs. From this strange, terrifying beginning the narrative moves to the City of Laughter, an amusement park where children infected with the virus can enjoy one last, fun-filled day before riding a roller coaster designed to kill them. Nagamatsu’s characters inhabit societies so overwhelmed by death that funerary services of various kinds dominate the economy and in which the past is disappearing while it’s impossible to imagine a future. Many of the chapters in this novel were first published as short stories. Cobbling these stories together makes a novel-length book, but it doesn’t necessarily make a satisfying novel. The different ways in which people deal with grief and survival accumulate without revealing new insights. The chapter in which a man contemplating suicide finds connection in a virtual world is an echo of the chapter about a man who repairs robotic pets who speak in the voices of the dead. A chapter in which a forensic pathologist falls in love with a man who has donated his body for research is virtually the same as the chapter in which a funerary artist who makes ice sculptures from liquified remains falls in love with 24
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15 october 2021
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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