title: Nocilla Trilogy by: Mallo, Agustín Fernández published: 2022-05-18 read: 2024-09-01 preview

The Nocilla Trilogy describes experience. And I don’t really know what to write about it. Better I should have the book write about itself. After all, it does. With around 600 pages, consisting of Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, Nocilla Lab, it’s kind of tough putting it all together.

The first part focusses a lot on boots:

He looks at his boots. He didn’t even like them when he bought them. He takes them off and throws them onto the fire in the hearth. After a time all that remains are the bents bits of metal that keep the soles rigid. He pulls apart one of the biscuits they make on the chain, and dunks a layer in the coffee; they’re so buttery a floating archipelago of mirrors appears on the surface. He closes the tin. The lid is marked with an enbaubled Christmas tree. He lights a cigarette.

Some chapters are long, some chapters are short, like #12, consisting of a quote only:

Augmented Reality: via the appropriate combination of the physical and virtual worlds, the missing information can be obtained, as happens in the recreation of the view of an airport that a pilot would have if it weren’t for the snow. (Luis Arroyo)

Shoes:

At 6 p.m. Falconetti pitches up at the poplar that found water, halting in the shade, dropping the green backpack and using it for his pillow as he lowers himself to the ground. He gazes upwards. Finding the swaying of so many shoes hypnotic, he begins to doze off.

…and relationships, as the contents of chapter 17:

Of all the manias, without a doubt the most widespread is morning lovemaking. Men always want to at this hour, and end up persuading women. Not a problem if one lives sheltered within the four walls of a house. So let’s imagine a homeless couple that sets up on some parcel of open ground or out in the desert; for them the act requires taking cover under the shade of a tree or a bush or a wall. In time the mechanical thrusts and shoves will inevitably begin to mark on the ground, and in the end there will always be some person devising theories that link these marks with spacecraft landings. This is what happened with Kent Fall, the mayor of Ely, who on a morning in 1982 saw very deep marks in the shade of the poplar that found water, deep and gestural and arithmetic, bored into the earth. Above, hanging from one of the branches, he found two pairs of shoes.

…and micronations, as in Chapter 47:

In 1971, a group of hippies took over an abandoned military base in Copenhagen, Denmark, proclaiming it the free state of Christiania: a micronation. After grappling with the Danish government for a period of time, in 1987 it was finally recognized as an independent micronation. Among the eighteen students who occupied the base that night was Hans, still a teenager then, and as he lay on the floor in a greenish half-light that, like a military effluvium, seemed to float between the paving and the skylights high above, he made the decision never to wear shoes again: his bare white feet a symbol of peace and nonviolence. Christiania’s present-day population comprises 760 adults, 250 children, 1,500 dogs and 14 horses.

Then, close to the end of book 1:

Paris is a city in Texas. Yeah well anyway (says Josep), you know what I mean, by the way, on Texas, I’m gonna tell you this thing that happened in the U.S., such a good story; my colleague and good friend R. S. Lloyd, great designer, lives in the States, well he asked me if I could do a job for him, he’d said yes but then had too much work on his hands, and since I was just starting out, and we help people in this line of work, we help our fellow manhole cover maker, and he asked me, and of course I said yes, I’m getting another Coke, what about you? (Kenny asks for another Coke too), so it was for the manhole covers for a city called Carson City, in the State of Nevada I’m pretty sure, could’ve been New Mexico, anyway, who cares, they’re basically the same, and when I showed up there, your typical shithole, nothing going for it but the amazing brothels, they already knew exactly what they were after, 50 per cent cast iron, 35 per cent steel, 15 per cent American nickel, it was going to be circular and in the middle they wanted an embossed poplar, yes sirree, a simple American poplar, but get this, it was supposed to have two pairs of shoes hanging from it, strangely, the shoes had appeared one day, I was told, years back, no one knew why, and they’d become like a symbol for the town, something like that, and since it isn’t my job to poke my nose where it isn’t wanted, I got to work, no PCs or 3D programming in those days, right, proper work it was, proper work, so the designs took me a little while, axial planes, sagittal planes – I know I shouldn’t get too technical with you – but anyway I put them forward to the mayor and the evaluating committee, and they loved them, but then, someone from a nearby town called Ely, nearby as in 250 miles away, well they got wind of it and then they say they want some manhole covers the same as Carson’s, with the two pairs of shoes, because in their view the poplar is more theirs than Carson City’s, seeing as it was the mayor of Ely who first discovered the shoes.

Enough about shoes. You get the idea. The 100+ chapters of book 1 are disconnected, but with many recurring themes, some repetitions, and an edifice is built with many omissions, still, who said that our brain is a giant correlation machine? Well, good for this book.

In book 2, the Nocilla Experience, chapter 64 quotes a wikipedia page, beginning like this:

The Bélmez faces are an alleged paranormal phenomenon in a private house in Spain which started in 1971 when residents claimed images of faces appeared in the concrete floor of the house. These images have continuously formed and disappeared on the floor of the home. Located at the Pereira family home at Calle Real 5, Bélmez de la Moraleda, Jaén, Andalusia, Spain, the Bélmez faces have been responsible for bringing large numbers of sightseers to Bélmez.

A part of the short chapter 88:

Now, after 3 years of running 40 kilometres a day, he has arrived in Alaska, and soon he will have no choice but to turn around and head south again. From the window of a following TV car he is asked by a local reporter to explain his run, to which he says, I went to pieces after getting divorced, left my job as a doctor, moved to Miami. A few days after I got myself set up, I went to the supermarket and bought a packet of Corn Flakes, the classic kind, and when I got home I saw that the sell-by-date was my ex-wife’s birthday. I went back to the supermarket and asked them to bring me all the packets of Corn Flakes they had with this sell-by-date.

And he starts walking, after having eaten all the cornflakes. Apart from shoes, the differences between books 1 and 2 are difficult to pin down. Book 2, the Nocilla Experience, has many increasingly long quotes from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a movie with which I have my own colourful, unpleasant history.

Book 3, its last part, is about a couple who stay in hotels while putting together an art installation; and the last hotel is an ex-prison, converted to a hotel, in which the owner tries to keep guests away, as he doesn’t need their money.

We drove around the outside of the garden, staying in first, and came to a wooden portico door. There was a sign to one side, very new-looking, which read ‘Reception’ in Andale-Mono font. I pressed the buzzer.

This part of the book, the main character of that part, and the owner of the hotel, amalgamate into one person, and when one of the two is killed, there is little difference between the one and the other.

The book ends with a comic of an author, who wants to escape life, on an oil rig.

My verdict on this book? A friend whom I love much put it to my attention, and it was, indeed, an experience. But after having finished the first two books, I put it aside for a while and read a few other books (Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont; Jenni Keer, No 23 Burlington Square; Pat Barker, The Voyage Home), and the joy of especially the last one gave me the courage to return here and finish this trilogy quickly.

It’s a piece of art, deserves a place in a museum. My takeaway message was limited. It’s one of those books I should reread – but never will, I fear. If you want to get a good idea of the trilogy, I recommend this beautiful review.