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Proyecto Nocilla #3
Nocilla Lab
El desastre de Chiang Mai durante un viaje a Tailandia fue la azarosa oportunidad para que AgustÃn 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 sà mismo en un final original y sorprendente.
Como un demiurgo disfrazado de DJ ficcional, AgustÃn 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 fÃsica elemental.
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 sà mismo en un final original y sorprendente.
Como un demiurgo disfrazado de DJ ficcional, AgustÃn 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 fÃsica elemental.
180 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2009
16 people are currently reading
398 people want to read
About the author
AgustÃn Fernández Mallo
40Ìýbooks222ÌýfollowersAgustÃn Fernández Mallo (A Coruña, 1967) es un fÃsico y escritor español afincado en Palma de Mallorca. Es uno de los miembros más destacados de la llamada Generación Nocilla, Generación Mutante o Afterpop, cuya denominación más popular procede del tÃtulo de una serie de sus novelas.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
August 7, 2019
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?
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 AgustÃn Fernández Mallo starts decomposing his narration replacing actuality with schizoid delirium the story simply turns preposterousâ€�
Sometimes wisdom just turns into inanity.
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 AgustÃn Fernández Mallo starts decomposing his narration replacing actuality with schizoid delirium the story simply turns preposterousâ€�
“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.
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March 13, 2025A 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 project, because it has so many visual elements. After that, 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 and on Vimeo.
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 Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, 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 current work that responds to 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 that 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.
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 project, because it has so many visual elements. After that, 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 and on Vimeo.
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 Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, 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 current work that responds to 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 that 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.
January 16, 2019
Nocilla Lab, originally published in 2009, is the third in a trilogy of novels from AgustÃn Fernández Mallo, brought into English by translator Thomas Bunstead, following (2006) and (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 (
This novel begins with a 71 page (it starts on page 11), single sentence stream of thoughts from a first person narrator, also called AgustÃn 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 AgustÃn 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 ), 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.
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 (
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 AgustÃn 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 AgustÃn 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 ), 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.
June 16, 2022
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
/review/show...
My Ferrero Rocher themed review of Nocilla Experience
/review/show...
A review of Nocilla Lab
/review/show...
(NB � Nocilla is a Spanish version of Nutella)
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
/review/show...
My Ferrero Rocher themed review of Nocilla Experience
/review/show...
A review of Nocilla Lab
/review/show...
(NB � Nocilla is a Spanish version of Nutella)
January 9, 2019
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.
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.
September 28, 2022
'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.
July 25, 2022
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.
December 15, 2020
I denna bok fanns det inget att hämta.
January 7, 2019
(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 “novelâ€� (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 –ÌýI might write a longer piece after some more reflection.
October 31, 2011
Con este acabo de terminar la lectura de la trilogÃa del Proyecto Nocilla, y tengo la misma sensación que en su momento me produjo ver Koyaanisqatsi.
January 18, 2019
CN: fatphobia.
I normally lap up experimental texts and I find texts made up of a single sentence hard to resist, but what I read of this felt hollow, and mostly I just skimmed it after page 50. Most of all, I have to say, I was massively turned off by the author's violent fatphobia. Page 46:
"... a fairly overweight woman who was sitting at a table with her husband 12 metres away from us, a woman who would happily ingest all manner of fats and thereby put an end to her youth, a woman who was cholesterol through and through, began compulsively wafting her hands and saying, for all to hear, You're smoking me out! You're smoking me out!, and it was a no-smoking place but all the same, this woman failed to see that she had destroyed her life to the extent that she no longer has any tolerance for other human beings, she was pure exaggeration, she had become the thing that resembles everything except itself, humankind reduced to a personality-less object, the very opposite of silence or of Coca-Cola, or that book entitled "The Music of Chance" that we had read in Las Vegas while [my girlfriend] lay smoking in silence and made of her body the perfect combination of 70% water and 30% smoke, because the fat pedant woman was ignorant of the fact that smoke and water combine to delicate effect, when added together they form a perfectly homogenous mixture, ignorant of the fact that 50% water and 50% fat of which her body was made would never mix..."
and at the bottom of p. 47:
"... extinguishing her cigarette out of respect for this woman's mental illness..."
Now, it does sound like this woman was genuinely rude, but it doesn't make Mallo less of a dickhead for saying these things, nor does the fact that the passage includes a tongue in cheek bit about the benefits of smoking. Especially as everything in the text points to the fact that at least the novel's first section is autobiographical, and a fairly accurate reflection of the author's thoughts and experiences, strongly suggesting that Mallo means everything he says about the woman, and, by extension, about all fat people ("humankind reduced to a personality-less object"!). In other words, if this had been a fictional character's thoughts, fine perhaps, but these do seem to be Mallo's own thoughts. And if they aren't, then it should have been clearer.
And since life is finite and there are tons of great books to read out there, I decided to curtail the time I was spending on this one and move on to something else (maybe a different Fitzcarraldo book, like Flights or This Little Art or Essayism or Tell Them of Battles, all wonderful). At first I was going to just remove the book from my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ shelf without making much of a fuss, but then it occurred to me that some may want to be warned about the above passage. And so here we are. I don't particularly wish to engage in a debate about the merits of my decision in the comments section.
I normally lap up experimental texts and I find texts made up of a single sentence hard to resist, but what I read of this felt hollow, and mostly I just skimmed it after page 50. Most of all, I have to say, I was massively turned off by the author's violent fatphobia. Page 46:
"... a fairly overweight woman who was sitting at a table with her husband 12 metres away from us, a woman who would happily ingest all manner of fats and thereby put an end to her youth, a woman who was cholesterol through and through, began compulsively wafting her hands and saying, for all to hear, You're smoking me out! You're smoking me out!, and it was a no-smoking place but all the same, this woman failed to see that she had destroyed her life to the extent that she no longer has any tolerance for other human beings, she was pure exaggeration, she had become the thing that resembles everything except itself, humankind reduced to a personality-less object, the very opposite of silence or of Coca-Cola, or that book entitled "The Music of Chance" that we had read in Las Vegas while [my girlfriend] lay smoking in silence and made of her body the perfect combination of 70% water and 30% smoke, because the fat pedant woman was ignorant of the fact that smoke and water combine to delicate effect, when added together they form a perfectly homogenous mixture, ignorant of the fact that 50% water and 50% fat of which her body was made would never mix..."
and at the bottom of p. 47:
"... extinguishing her cigarette out of respect for this woman's mental illness..."
Now, it does sound like this woman was genuinely rude, but it doesn't make Mallo less of a dickhead for saying these things, nor does the fact that the passage includes a tongue in cheek bit about the benefits of smoking. Especially as everything in the text points to the fact that at least the novel's first section is autobiographical, and a fairly accurate reflection of the author's thoughts and experiences, strongly suggesting that Mallo means everything he says about the woman, and, by extension, about all fat people ("humankind reduced to a personality-less object"!). In other words, if this had been a fictional character's thoughts, fine perhaps, but these do seem to be Mallo's own thoughts. And if they aren't, then it should have been clearer.
And since life is finite and there are tons of great books to read out there, I decided to curtail the time I was spending on this one and move on to something else (maybe a different Fitzcarraldo book, like Flights or This Little Art or Essayism or Tell Them of Battles, all wonderful). At first I was going to just remove the book from my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ shelf without making much of a fuss, but then it occurred to me that some may want to be warned about the above passage. And so here we are. I don't particularly wish to engage in a debate about the merits of my decision in the comments section.
Read
January 14, 2024", misschien is ieder niet-stabiel persoon dat omdat hij of zij ten prooi is gevallen aan een vergissing wat betreft de maat, zei ik tegen haar, en ik bekende haar een geheime obsessie, een obsessie die zij ondanks de jaren dat we al samen waren nooit had vermoed: mijn behoefte om te slapen in een bed met dezelfde verhoudingen als een a4'tje, dezelfde afmetingen op een andere schaal, Dat is de enige manier die bestaat om ervoor te zorgen dat je volkomen vlak uitrust,"
December 23, 2022
If you look at Emmy's butter review, its true. I have to doc this simply because of the first part, although necessary (I guess, I mean I am probably not smart enough to know why) it diverges from the other parts in such an interesting way, but the final two parts, I mean thats good stuff, family fun out here.
August 18, 2022
A perfectly wild end to the Nocilla Trilogy.
Read
February 4, 2025melting face emoji
April 10, 2025
mostly enjoyed.
really interesting style of writing with almost circular framing.
Nostalgic and romantic descriptions.
enjoyed less as he goes crazy
really interesting style of writing with almost circular framing.
Nostalgic and romantic descriptions.
enjoyed less as he goes crazy
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 12, 2015
Hay que reconocer que es una novela que se adapta a los tiempos modernos en tanto a que relaciona historias breves globalizando dichas historias a través de personajes arquetÃpicos de la cultura contemporánea (aunque el amigo Mallo nos lo quiera vender de realista). El lenguaje breve y conciso es un claro reflejo de la sociedad de la inmediatez en la que vivimos y el incesante cambio de historias nos presenta un zapping literario.
September 3, 2022
the nocilla series is bonkers. the first book is still my fav and i was quite put off by the second once which was a little bland but the third one really saved it. i wasnt so crazy about the first long chapter of the book since it so drastically changed the form of the first two books. however, i think a more grounded narrative worked to tie the series together.
March 8, 2019
The Nocilla trilogy is strange. It feels familiar in the way the internet does. The first two books are told in a similar style: they present about a page of text in third person about a person struggling with their relationship to something or someone—typically something, manifested through their relationship with someone. I can’t claim to understand them in any overarching or systematic way. They seem like they present a vision of our relationship to allegory and metaphor while playing in a space that feels similar to 2666, in the sense that if we can’t have a coherent narrative or present a singular story we all rally behind we can still have something. It builds on that, even though the author admits to never having read it, though there is a character who airs out his theorems on clotheslines much like a character in Bolaño’s novel airs out a geometry book on a clothesline. We spend time in both books thinking about what this means to the character and to us as readers, and I’m not really sure we get super far in a way I can set down definitively, though the experience is interesting, if not enlightening.
The last book, Nocilla Lab, is where things change. The form changes suddenly: the first part is a single 64-page sentence. I liked this part a lot, though it was challenging to read because the style of the previous books remained: nearly but not quite verse, but set in prose. I won’t spoil the rest of the book, but it plays with form and representation and metaphor in a way few pieces of media do.
There are parts I don’t like. I don’t like how most of the characters are men, how there’s a kind of universality to the phallocentrism of all the narratives, even the ones about women. I don’t like how in one case, a character offers a terrible description of a fat women after she chides him for smoking in a non-smoking area. (The author loves cigarettes more than almost anything. This comes through clearly in every book.) This character offers a page of beautiful description and metaphor and inference about how terrible this woman is, how she embodies all that is bad in humanity, &c, but does not turn his critical lens on himself and both what he was doing to prompt the rebuke and what his own behavior means in the context of what he’s discussing. Perhaps that’s kind of the point. It’s a good writer that can make me continue to read a book after I loathe a character.
These books are absolutely worth your time.
The last book, Nocilla Lab, is where things change. The form changes suddenly: the first part is a single 64-page sentence. I liked this part a lot, though it was challenging to read because the style of the previous books remained: nearly but not quite verse, but set in prose. I won’t spoil the rest of the book, but it plays with form and representation and metaphor in a way few pieces of media do.
There are parts I don’t like. I don’t like how most of the characters are men, how there’s a kind of universality to the phallocentrism of all the narratives, even the ones about women. I don’t like how in one case, a character offers a terrible description of a fat women after she chides him for smoking in a non-smoking area. (The author loves cigarettes more than almost anything. This comes through clearly in every book.) This character offers a page of beautiful description and metaphor and inference about how terrible this woman is, how she embodies all that is bad in humanity, &c, but does not turn his critical lens on himself and both what he was doing to prompt the rebuke and what his own behavior means in the context of what he’s discussing. Perhaps that’s kind of the point. It’s a good writer that can make me continue to read a book after I loathe a character.
These books are absolutely worth your time.
July 13, 2019
As you can tell by the star rating, I really didn't get on with this. I have honestly no idea what I or anybody else is meant to get from the experience of reading this novel. The narrator, who is on some level the author, is unlikable. He is made incandescently furious by an overweight woman who complains about his girlfriend's smoking for some bizarre aesthetic reason, and constantly talks about his girlfriend's physical appearance.
The first and largest part of the book is written stream of consciousness, with no paragraphs or full stops, despite the writing clearly including phrases that call out for both of them. This makes reading it unnecessarily tiring. Nothing much happens in it - detail is revealed aching slowly, and I don't understand why using non-standard punctuation is meant improve my experience of the book. It is vaguely hinted that this is to increase the reader's understanding of the importance of gaps and silence when consuming literature, but if there is more than this, it is oblique to me.
The second part of the book is written grammatically. Be warned: what follows is technically spoilers, but this book doesn't have a plot to speak of. In book's second part, the author meets an older version of himself (himself from the future? Who knows!) in a former prison turned tax-dodging eco-resort, and gradually goes completely insane, with the imagery of the book becoming increasingly dreamlike.
There are various low-quality photographs, and the book ends with a short section of graphic novel.
I have recently been making a conscious effort to broaden my reading, including various books which are more literary or even experimental. This was entirely a bridge too far. I am aware that lot of art requires effort to appreciate, but the effort that this would have required from feels frankly arrogant on the part of the author. There was nothing to intrigue me or grip me in the book, and anything that seemed like it might be interesting didn't go anywhere, and neither were there characters that I was sympathetic towards.
For me, worth reading if you are convinced that all conventional literature is boring and samey. So, for me, not worth reading.
The first and largest part of the book is written stream of consciousness, with no paragraphs or full stops, despite the writing clearly including phrases that call out for both of them. This makes reading it unnecessarily tiring. Nothing much happens in it - detail is revealed aching slowly, and I don't understand why using non-standard punctuation is meant improve my experience of the book. It is vaguely hinted that this is to increase the reader's understanding of the importance of gaps and silence when consuming literature, but if there is more than this, it is oblique to me.
The second part of the book is written grammatically. Be warned: what follows is technically spoilers, but this book doesn't have a plot to speak of. In book's second part, the author meets an older version of himself (himself from the future? Who knows!) in a former prison turned tax-dodging eco-resort, and gradually goes completely insane, with the imagery of the book becoming increasingly dreamlike.
There are various low-quality photographs, and the book ends with a short section of graphic novel.
I have recently been making a conscious effort to broaden my reading, including various books which are more literary or even experimental. This was entirely a bridge too far. I am aware that lot of art requires effort to appreciate, but the effort that this would have required from feels frankly arrogant on the part of the author. There was nothing to intrigue me or grip me in the book, and anything that seemed like it might be interesting didn't go anywhere, and neither were there characters that I was sympathetic towards.
For me, worth reading if you are convinced that all conventional literature is boring and samey. So, for me, not worth reading.
July 9, 2019
If you've ever seen Denis Villeneuve's avante-garde film Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, then you may have some idea what this novel is like. Off-kilter, disturbing, and poetic, never have I read a novel which so closely resembles stepping into an avante-garde film.
Entertaining and wildly offbeat, Nocilla Lab goes in directions that no reader could predict after reading the first two novels.
On one hand, I concede completely: it's a load of classic pretentious male Postmodernist BS. But on the other it's loads of fun. And so yes, even though it's pretentious, even though it's one of those self-indulgent novels that's to some extent about the act of writing more than anything else, I loved reading Nocilla Lab. I liked it even more than the first novel.
Some reasons why: While reading the first novel, I thought I detected the influence of Don Delillo in its pages, Delillo being one of my personal favorite writers. After reading the third one, I searched around and found an interview with Agustin Fernandez Mallo in which he cited Delillo as one of his biggest influences. So if you like Delillo, especially something like Underworld, you will probably love these novels as well.
Part of this is the fact that they are brief novels. Mallo's experiment is careful never to overstay its welcome. And this is a blessing.
Entertaining and wildly offbeat, Nocilla Lab goes in directions that no reader could predict after reading the first two novels.
On one hand, I concede completely: it's a load of classic pretentious male Postmodernist BS. But on the other it's loads of fun. And so yes, even though it's pretentious, even though it's one of those self-indulgent novels that's to some extent about the act of writing more than anything else, I loved reading Nocilla Lab. I liked it even more than the first novel.
Some reasons why: While reading the first novel, I thought I detected the influence of Don Delillo in its pages, Delillo being one of my personal favorite writers. After reading the third one, I searched around and found an interview with Agustin Fernandez Mallo in which he cited Delillo as one of his biggest influences. So if you like Delillo, especially something like Underworld, you will probably love these novels as well.
Part of this is the fact that they are brief novels. Mallo's experiment is careful never to overstay its welcome. And this is a blessing.
March 13, 2025
easily the worst of the trilogy. doubles down on the sexism that's pervaded these books (in prior installments women were by and large reduced to wives or strippers, but at least they did things other than just leave their men - here Mallo's - or a fictional version of him, or his doppelganger, or or or whatever - girlfriend is discussed solely for her body and the clothes she wears and her personality only exists as something to be compatible or incompatible with his own) and does so in the form of a transparent and lazy riff on the existential metafiction of Paul Auster, who's repeatedly cited by name as an inspiration. Even Auster, a generationally skilled writer of literary fiction, can often overdo this stuff - to see a writer with a debut novel-writing "Project" so ambitious regurgitate this stuff in an even more solipsistic way than his predecessors (peep the list of quotes from other authors that are all contextualized as being Mallo tributes - a funny joke, but only if the whole thing's a pisstake, which it doesn't seem to be) is pretty embarrassing.
March 9, 2023
Me lo he leÃdo sin saber que era el tercero de la trilogÃa y no me he enterado hasta que he llegado a la página de agradecimientos, supongo que dice un poco del libro en si, le pongo 5 estrellas porque me ha gustado un montón, me alucinaâ€� porque agustin Fernández mallo tiene una cabeza súper chula, me encanta la manera que tiene de hilar cosas sin embargo no me gusta la Coca Cola pero bueno me hace reflexionar siempre. El libro gira en torno a un proyecto y mediante cosas cotidianas conectadas de una manera diferente que no es cotidiana por asà decirlo y que en una estructura social como la que hay hoy en dÃa despuntan bastante, consigue narrar una historia en la que van pasando cosas bastante normales pero hiladas de una manera anormal o algo asà y bueno luego ya estalla la
Locura, genial hay que leerlo
Locura, genial hay que leerlo
July 9, 2023
En esta reseña valoro la trilogÃa que abarca el proyecto Nocilla.
Desde un punto de vista literario, es una bomba experimental que me ha encantado. La manera en la que el autor hila cosas que no parecen tener relación entre sà es maravillosa.
El estilo es un caleidoscopio. Desde relatos sencillos y cortos hasta textos puramente cientÃficos que hay que leer con calma. De construcción variable, es una obra que, si se lee con paciencia, se disfruta muchÃsimo.
No le doy cinco estrellas porque hay ocasiones en las que los textos se enrevesan un poco, pero qué envidia de pieza literaria y qué mente la de AgustÃn.
Desde un punto de vista literario, es una bomba experimental que me ha encantado. La manera en la que el autor hila cosas que no parecen tener relación entre sà es maravillosa.
El estilo es un caleidoscopio. Desde relatos sencillos y cortos hasta textos puramente cientÃficos que hay que leer con calma. De construcción variable, es una obra que, si se lee con paciencia, se disfruta muchÃsimo.
No le doy cinco estrellas porque hay ocasiones en las que los textos se enrevesan un poco, pero qué envidia de pieza literaria y qué mente la de AgustÃn.
March 8, 2019
A writer and his girlfriend traveling around Sardinia. Art projects and stalled creativity. Odd, original thoughts and world views, life in the digital age. Looping, poetic repitition. On the edge of madness. Mixed format and genre, knowing nods to its influences (Paul Auster and many others). Final metafictional part of a trilogy. Ends beautifully. Totally brilliant.
July 27, 2022
Took me forever, had to mix in mrs Brodie to plod through. This whole series as a miss for me which is strange because I’m completely obsessed with his other novel “the things we’ve seen� but I’m also a big believer of the idea that if an artist does one great thing then that’s enough!
January 18, 2020
Una artimaña. Siempre fui más de Nutella.
June 14, 2020
There are enough lengthy reviews of this book that we surely do not need one more. But in the interest of my own memory, I'll simply say that I loved it.
March 19, 2021
Really enjoyed it! My favorite of the three.
December 12, 2022
the first part reads like butter, then the second part you find the butter has been drugged, and in the final part you admit it’s been a good trip
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