The Nocilla Trilogy

Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, Nocilla Lab

By: Agustín Fernández Mallo, Thomas Bunstead - translator

Narrated by: Jason Manuel Olazabal

A landmark in contemporary Spanish literature, Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy - Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Lab, and Nocilla Experience - presents multiple narratives of people and places that reflect America and the world in the digital age of the 21st century.

In the middle of the Nevada desert stands a solitary poplar tree covered in hundreds of pairs of shoes. Farther along Route 50, a lonely prostitute falls in love with a collector of found photographs. In Las Vegas, an Argentine man builds a peculiar monument to Jorge Luis Borges. On the run from the authorities, Kenny takes up permanent residence in the legal non-place of Singapore International Airport, while the novelists Enrique Vila-Matas and Agustín Fernández Mallo encounter each other on an oil rig.

These are just a few of the narrative strands that make up Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, and Nocilla Lab. Greeted as a landmark in contemporary Spanish literature, the entire trilogy has not been available in English until now.

“By juxtaposing fiction with non-fiction...the author has created a hybrid genre that mirrors our networked lives, allowing us to inhabit its interstitial spaces. A physician as well as an artist, Fernández Mallo can spot a mermaid’s tail in a neutron monitor; estrange theorems into pure poetry.” (Andrew Gallix, The Independent)

“An encyclopedia, a survey, a deranged anthropology: Nocilla Dream is just the coldhearted poetics that might see America for what it really is. There is something deeply strange and finally unknowable about this book, in the very best way.” (Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet)

(P)2019 Macmillan Audio

A Trilogy that should have been just one.

The first book in this trilogy is fresh, funny and intriguing and all the "mini" chapters eventually come together in an amusing way. The second and third book drag--they're repetitive and not as alluring.
After listening to some of the vignets, I'd ask myself if I should continue -- since it's a trilogy there's always hope the third book will make up for the drab second one, but alas that was not the case.
It's not that it's a difficult read, on the contrary. It just feels too repetitive and unimaginative after a while.