Is it best to start the year by traveling through the pages of an apocalyptic novel? It’s not supposed to be the best way to recover from holiday hangovers and making promises that are already starting to go unfulfilled. But, seen another way, perhaps contemplating a nightmarish future will help us endure our bittersweet dreams of the present a little better. And even better if —composed of twelve self-concluding chapters/stories but perfectly threaded with different voices over time, like ‘The Martian Chronicles’ or what David Mitchell usually orchestrates— it is a novel as formidable as this one. And Sequoia Nagamatsu (California, 1982) had already pointed out impeccable ways with her debut/storybook, ‘Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone’, where she managed to merge/confuse magical realism, Japanese pop folklorism, formal mastery ( there is that wonder that is ‘The Passage of Time in the Abyss’) and a certain perfume of Murakami in partnership with the darkest of the Brothers Grimm to which was added an emotional power that was definitely its own. NOVEL ‘At the end of darkness’ Author Sequoia Nagamatsu Editorial Nocturna Year 2024 Pages 352 Price 18.95 euros 5But ‘At the end of darkness’ (where, again, what once was and is no longer is a leitmotiv, especially in what makes the little ones; Nagamatsu already announced new title, ‘Girl Zero’, where parents replace their dead little daughter with a ‘shape-shifter’ that it evokes and duplicates it) is something even far superior. Something that puts him on par with Ted Chiang with prose as dazzling as it is melancholic that recalls, in its forceful delicacy, the Sturgeon of ‘The Dreaming Crystals’ and ‘More Than Human’. And I already said it once: science fiction literature is not about ideas but about ideas. The proposal of something new and never anticipated or predicted is almost mandatory. And here Nagamatsu – proud owner of a robot dog named Calvino – accepts the challenge and more than meets the challenge. Pandemic plot – but written before the coronavirus – that spreads and spreads from the Siberian exhumation of an ancient virus in Annie: 30,000-year-old girl-fossil. Pandemic plot – but written before the coronavirus – that spreads and spreads from the Siberian exhumation of an ancient virusThe then baptized ‘Arctic Plague’ spreads throughout the planet in 2031 with ‘modus operandi’ that, yes, had not occurred to anyone: it mainly attacks children and its extreme symptom is to slowly change/mutate their internal organs until they produce the most agonizing of deaths. And what ‘At the End of Darkness’ tells—in such painful, lyrical and epiphanic detail—is how adults deal with horror. Thus, Ballardian theme-euthanasia parks and funereal skyscrapers, a talking pig as a substitute, the metamorphosis of social classes and customs, suicide pacts, electric pets, tumorous mini black holes, the cosmic search for light and—6000 years later—the views from a new and distant planet in which, when asked what happened, it is answered with a ‘zen koan’ cadence that “we become everything we go through until we are that that we believe. And what Nagamatsu passes through here and has created is a book as painful and sad as it is relieving and optimistic. It is also a masterpiece. Happy new world.
#darkness #Sequoia #Nagamatsu #childhood
