Praise for Rodrigo Fresán
“In this latest work from Rodrigo Fresán, the Argentine writer succeeds in offering us a book that closely resembles what he calls an ‘orphan book.’ These are books that come out of nowhere and that probably have no descendants, books like Nightwood by Djuana Barnes or Oh What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever. They are books that feed on themselves, that are self-sufficient like autonomous machines, and that generally possess immense poetic force. In The Bottom of the Sky, Fresán writes the book that will come immediately after the era of apocalyptic books—the era that began with the Bible and the Aeneid, and culminated with postmodern books about the end of all possible worlds.”—Enrique Vila-Matas
“The Bottom of the Sky shows us that reality is a kind of science fiction; science fiction has become reality. And while terrorism, invasions, and unending wars have led humans to treat one another like alien species, Fresán asks us to imagine that love, in its purest form, can survive and even triumph over chaos and brutality.”
—Rachel Cordasco, Speculative Fiction in Translation
“Rodrigo Fresán is a marvelous writer, a direct descendent of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, but with his own voice and of his own time, with a fertile imagination, daring and gifted with a vision as entertaining as it is profound.”—John Banville
“The Bottom of the Sky is an exuberant story transcending both space and time, shaded with hues paying homage to the sci-fi greats (with so many literary [and pop culture] nods along the way: Vonnegut, Dick, Cheever, Bioy Casares, Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, et al.). Fresán’s ambitious tale is, at once, a love story, an enigmatic eschatological puzzle, a book rooted firmly in the present while simultaneously orbiting in a far-off realm, and a genre-transcending work unbound by formulaic construct or conceit. [. . .] Read Fresán. And then tell everyone you know to read him, too.”—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books
“A vast Argentinean bildungsroman of reading and writing, Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part . . . offers one form of resistance to encroaching fascism: style.”—Adam Thirlwell
“A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room.”—Jonathan Lethem
“I’ve read few novels this exciting in recent years. Mantra is the novel I’ve laughed with the most, the one that has seemed the most virtuosic and at the same time the most disruptive.”—Roberto Bolaño
“[The Invented Part is] a tour de force. . . . Invented, and deeply inventive as well, an exemplary postmodern novel that is both literature and entertainment.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“The question of whether The Invented Part is a novel was a rhetorical exercise meant to draw out certain aspects of this text. Of course, it is a novel. It is, however, something much more: a resounding refutation of the assertion that the novel is dead, and a statement of how omnivorous and adaptable the form is.”—George Henson, Quarterly Conversation
“Rodrigo Fresán elegantly balances the strange with the common, the experimental with the traditional, and the result is one of the most satisfying postmodern novels in recent memory.”—Benjamin Woodard, Numero Cinq
“If Borges and Pynchon fell off a boat, Fresán would be the one to come out of the water.”—Gilles Heuré, Télérama
Also by Rodrigo Fresán
in English Translation
The Invented Part
Kensington Gardens
Copyright © Rodrigo Fresán, 2009
Translation copyright © Will Vanderhyden, 2018
First edition, 2018
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-79-3
This project is supported in part by an award from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627
For Daniel,
in Ana’s arms
pointing up at the stars
Contents
II. The Space between This Planet and the Other Planet
Explanation and Acknowledgements
Reality (like big cities) has been extended and ramified in recent years. This has influenced time.
—ADOLFO BIOY CASARES
One can be a lover of Space and its possibilities [. . .] I am also aware that Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors [. . .] Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time a singing in the ears.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with that relation [. . .] There are optical errors in time as well as space [. . .] The only real journey, the only Fountain of Youth, would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see, or can be. . . .
—MARCEL PROUST
I don’t think you can stand outside the universe.
—KURT
