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Book Review: ‘Brother Brontë,’ by Fernando A. Flores

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Book Review: ‘Brother Brontë,’ by Fernando A. Flores

“Brother Brontë” is like that mythical sub sandwich with literally everything on it. There are tangential joy rides into Jazzmin Monelle’s other novels, such as “I Was a Teenage Brain Parasite” (one of the great wish-I’d-come-up-with-that titles) and “Ghosts in the Zapotec Sphericals” (which features a Borges-like protagonist, the blind director of the Biblioteca Nacional de Buenos Aires, who, using a red rose and a mirror, saves a distant dying planet, Zapotec, from destruction). There’s a play called “Great Headwounds in Underground Art Movements.” There’s a magical tiger straight outta Bollywood. There are Shakespearean identity switches, assassinations and black markets for every conceivable item (since no consumer goods seem readily available anymore).

This is not a book for the abstemious reader. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of sumptuous language to gorge on. The prose can be volatile, gloriously anarchic, levitating off the page:

Turmeric-colored mist had hidden wheels and levers operated by giddy, sadistic gnomes.

Her head felt like it was a tiny head trying to break out of a larger, more oppressive head, and her stomach held smoldering cinders.

Silence. The keys of a piano, ascending like a spiral staircase within the bare bones of a blood-filled mountain. Then a voice. A voice to turn bags of pork cracklings into fig trees.

She pictured the clouds above cracking open like an inflating pig bladder, giving birth to the giant moth that would spray its mouth juices onto Three Rivers.

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That a book can be so oneiric and phantasmagorical and so deeply dialectical at the same time I find pretty amazing. It’s Bosch meets Brecht. Flores is not what one would call a polemical writer. But he seems to ask: Can one be so naïve right now as to maintain our inalienable right to poetry (and to live poetically)? And isn’t there something insurrectionary about that naïveté? There’s an eschatological yearning to “Brother Brontë,” as if losing this world might be our only hope for some last intimacy with it.

Of course, the criminalization of book possession, the notion of reading as taboo, as transgression, would make almost any text that much more titillating. But I must say, from my subterranean lair, hidden from the drones of the chupacabras, that I haven’t read a novel so rambunctiously lyrical and as gloriously evangelical about literature in a long time. Bravo to Brother Brontë himself, Fernando A. Flores.


BROTHER BRONTË | By Fernando A. Flores | MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 337 pp. | $28

Culture

Try This Quiz on Literary Quotations About American Life

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Try This Quiz on Literary Quotations About American Life

Among the many complaints made about the modern American novelist, the loudest, if not the most intelligent, has been the charge that he is not speaking for his country. A few seasons back an editorial in Life magazine asked grandly, “Who speaks for America today?” and was not able to conclude that our novelists, or at least our most gifted ones, did.

This opening paragraph is from an essay titled “The Fiction Writer and His Country” by a writer whose work was influenced by Catholicism, the rural South and peacocks. Who was it?

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Test Your Knowledge of New York’s Algonquin Round Table

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Test Your Knowledge of New York’s Algonquin Round Table

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is all about an influential group of writers, editors and other creative types known as the Algonquin Round Table. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to related books and other information about the era if you’d like to do further reading.

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Test Your Knowledge of History’s Most Famous Libraries

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Test Your Knowledge of History’s Most Famous Libraries

A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. But as it’s summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and travel adventures abound, this week’s literary geography quiz takes you on a trivia tour of notable libraries around the world. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to more information if you’d like to do further reading.

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