The original cover and in its language of ‘Atracón’ by the Canadian (but born at an air base in Germany in 1961) Douglas Coupland made things clear from the beginning. There, a photograph/still of a very young Courteney Cox—before achieving universal fame as Monica from Friends—dancing in 1984 with the ‘Boss’ in the famous video clip for ‘Dancing in the Dark’. Which means that Coupland knows perfectly well where he came from and where he is getting back into in his return to fiction after a hiatus of more than a decade dedicated to sui-generis essays and quasi- museological-prophetic ‘by design’ research. of his country. Related News REVIEW OF: standard Yes ‘James’, by Percival Everett: the voice of the slave from ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ Rodrigo Fresán A twist to the famous novel by Mark Twain, banned today in more than one library and public school American Coupland recognizes and recognizes himself, yes, as once a generational writer: a category that was at first enthralling and soon more than complicated (it is enough to remember the degeneration suffered by the fashionable and suddenly unfashionable Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Brautigan; Vonnegut was probably the only one among them who knew how to maintain his place and be accompanied to the end by his young and not so young fans). NOVEL ‘Atracón’ Author Douglas Coupland Publisher Alianza Year 2024 Pages 272 Price 18.95 euros 4That is to say: Coupland triumphed from one day to the next with his novel-encyclopedic debut for an ‘accelerated culture’—whose title, in addition, became a label sociological—Generation ‘Eleanor Rigby’); anthropologically explored the new ‘technologies’ as identifying signs of new clans/tribes/families in something that seemed like psychotic ‘sitcoms’ that were too good-funny (‘Microserfs’ and ‘jPod’ and ‘Generation A’); and today he is something like an admirable ‘vintage’ author (noble version of the old-fashioned). Fortunately Coupland—an angelic version of his diabolical counterpart, the also generational and increasingly better Bret Easton Ellis—is not just a ‘boomer’: he is also an excellent writer who is easy to classify alongside Ballard and DeLillo, Powers, Hunter S. Thompson, Murakami and, at times, the sublime Capote of ‘Music for Chameleons’. And ‘Atracón’ – subtitled somewhat portentously as ’60 stories to make your mind feel’ – is a good example of this. Here, six dozen micro-fictions that end up forming a mosaic between Warholian and Netflix: because the title refers to that marathon compulsion (that voracity without hunger) of watching complete seasons of series in a couple of days or staring at them for hours ‘chez Reddit/TikTok’ barely remembering reading ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ by Sherwood Anderson or ‘Spoon River Anthology’ by Edgar Lee Masters. Shifty/fluid first person, pop references, Surprising ‘data freak’, medications/epidemics… And ‘Atracón’ is a bit of that: a kind of ‘zapping’ without changing the channel that evokes the ensemble films of Robert Altman or the individual solipsisms of Charlie Kaufman. Thus, changing/fluid first person, pop references, surprising ‘data freak’, medications/epidemics, subtle recurrence of some character (which could be someone arranging someone’s murder or someone wanting to know what sex is about before dying so young), drones and de/computers (and ramen). And the feeling of being ready to ‘see’ something transcendent that—finally and Salingerian—will be the responsibility of the reader, who must discover and understand if he has committed “the eighth mortal sin” or if he believes in that “people don’t change.” : decays. Let’s also say it: ‘Binge’ does not live up to the spiritual mastery that Coupland demonstrated in his formidable collection of stories ‘Life after God’ (1994); but it’s a welcome return from/to/for Coupland. Someone who once said that “I hate my generation so much that I managed to invent a way to get out of it.” For better or worse—for better—Coupland returns and here he re-enters.
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