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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.

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



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