Laura Vazquez’s novel The Endless Week is forthcoming this Fall in the US in English translation by Alex Niemi from publisher Dorothy. The Dorothy Project’s (enticing) description:
From the 2023 winner of the Prix Goncourt for poetry comes a debut novel unlike any other, a lyrical anti-epic about the beauty, violence, trauma, and absurdity of the internet age.
Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented one. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim’s online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. It is a major work by one of the most fearlessly original writers of our time.
“Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging” — I am the kind of sicko who will lap that up, maybe. I’ve had almost entirely hits with everything Dorothy has put out; even the misses were a thousand percent more interesting than most of the midlist stuff that comes through the house. Anyway.
Biblioklept 