The most shocking dystopian speculation is not clairvoyant or even extrapolative; it’s simply attentive — it discerns what’s right here, right now. It’s a matter of recognition. The evil Day-Glo clown staring at you through your bedroom window in the middle of the night is simply a reflection of you staring out at the emptiness that’s been there all along.
The dystopia situated in Three Rivers, Texas, in Fernando A. Flores’s marvelous new novel, “Brother Brontë,” is a recognizable, if hyperbolic (and not by much), facsimile of today’s flagrant realities.
There is venomous xenophobia and scapegoating, along with the complete disintegration of consensus about objective reality. Many days pass in darkness, the sun and moon and stars blocked out by volcanic smoke and toxic ash, a pall sometimes red, orange or yellow. Water is rationed. People buy homemade toilet paper from peddlers on the street using the tabs from aluminum cans as currency. There’s no internet, no television or radio. Wandering immigrants seeking asylum sleep packed in the tail of a crashed jetliner. A war of attrition is waged against single working mothers, who are required by law to indenture themselves to the Big Tex Fish Cannery. (Young men flee to work on Arctic oil derricks.)
And perhaps most bleakly dystopian (and integral to the story): The possession of books is illegal. In their indefatigable resourcefulness, people fabricate their own media to clandestinely convey text, like the “halceamadon,” a complexly folded piece of parchment paper containing a microscript written backward.
At the crux of it all is a cohort of intractable women who resist the prevailing regime and struggle to live authentic, exuberant lives in the face of tyrannical repression and widespread deprivation. There in the novel’s nucleus, as if radiantly enthroned at the center of a mandala, there amid this draconian book ban enforced by heavily armed ransacking chupacabras (the authorities are named after a cryptid that drinks the blood of goats) who burst into tenements in the middle of the night in search of books to shred, is Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, the cohort’s most beloved contraband author, her latest opus entitled “Brother Brontë.”
Grim prognoses aside, Flores’s novel is an absolute blast to read. Its madcap, carnivalesque backdrop is rendered in psychedelic polychromatics: onyx smokestacks, bright green warehouse walls, purple smog, yellow clouds. And it reeks. Of botanical perfumes, of animal sweat, of grilling onions and wurst, rotting fish, gasoline, blood, agua fresca, tamales, gorditas and powdered doughnuts.
Style is everything. (By “style” I mean the unique way one maneuvers oneself through the world, one’s singular manner of being.) Without it we are nothing but a gelatinous mass of faceless, click-baited consumers. This is what Pasolini railed against so indignantly: the fact that neocapitalist globalization and technology were effacing the style of his beloved ragazzi di vita, his lumpen street hustlers.
Flores’s style has an exhilarating punk, D.I.Y. aplomb; it’s as if he feels he’s inventing literature for the first time here, with all the lordly de haut en bas of an autodidact. Ontological instability is rampant — objects are alive, endlessly mutable, autonomous, yet subject to all manner of magic spells, incantations and mantras. Every shower curtain and paper clip is shot through with animistic sovereignty and panpsychism.
“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.
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