“Dengue Boy” is the strange, fleshy novel you need right now

Evolution, ethnography, epidemics – this is the soup of which Dengue BoyA brilliantly strange new novel by Argentine’s author Michel Niva. The Denga boy of the same name is a mosquito hybrid, a man who can be an experiment, a genetic mutant, or the result of some terrible corporate crime. It can be all three at once. In any case, it does not matter much for the monstrous creature we find that they live in 2272 in the remains of Argentina, after the melting of the Antarctica ice cap has made the greater part of the world or under water or impartially hot.

Hot enough to bake turkey for 20 minutes flat with what goes on for room temperature in California. Meanwhile, the Argentine Caribbean remains a comparative balm throughout the year from 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius). Then it is a little surprise that the developers were busy treating the Caribbean of Antarctica, engineering goals to create small slices on Earth, uh, Earth. For a fixed fee, customers can choose packages of five, 10 or 20 species to fill their biome. Who is interested in a tropical forest of the Amazon when you can do 30?

Humanity hangs, more or less, like a bug on the underside of a rock. On the other side of the rock are the privileged children of the Viroeconomy (more about this later). These children join virtual headsets and immerse themselves in conquest fantasies like the game Christians vs. Indians 2. One character fantasizes to acquire sheepies: close Donite lights with endless openings for research. Some have whole cabinets full of things.

I mention, Dengue BoyS Everything is very fleshy. The heads are separated, the tentacles fell, the insides come out – the book is a rebellion of bodily sensations. One can call the book “Climatic Fiction” as it is placed in a world, clearly in the spiral of the death of the climate, but that would be more than the fastening strangeness of the novel that skips the economy, sexuality, biology and temporality without at all Yes at all.

Any novel in which the main character finds himself in an insect body, attracts the inevitable comparison with MetamorphosisS The internal valve of the book describes Dengue Boy As “unusual, kafkaesque portrait of a dementian future.” But in Kafka’s novella, Gregor Samsa wakes up to turn out to be transformed into a monstrous mistake; His enormous pain comes from his knowledge of what he had ever been and the life he would like to crawl back.

The Denga boy has always been a Denga boy. He has no transformation he has to encounter. It is the outside world that needs to get to know him. “Where his mother would like to see fluffy hands, his wings emerge, their nerve endings like the varicose veins of a disgusting old man, and where his mother would like to hear laughing and delightful shouts, there was only a constant, a rumor that would make Even the safest soul despair. “

In MetamorphosisGregor Samsa’s transformation is a one -way street. But Dengue Boy will go through a whirlwind of changes, such as evolution that works quickly, until it becomes clear exactly where they are beginning or a fact or fiction.

In Dengue Boy The billionaire class is not a technological browse, but speculators of the so -called viroeconomics, which are relying on which disease is about to take off and then make murderous possible treatments. Along with the developers who build resorts on Earth, transferred by the withdrawal of ice hats, they are the only real winners in the disaster economy. A certain type of person is needed to look at a landscape that is destroyed and to see the opportunity for luxury apartments.

Which sounds a little depressing, except for the visceral, surreal prose at levels – translated by Spanish by Rahul Berry – is anything else. It is a book that takes away the terrible strangeness of the world and puts it into something that is both terrible and impossible to look far away. Remind me of the final scene of the movie Pearlin which Mia Goth stands in front of the camera with a rictus grinning that dragges and further as she sobs, slowly grimace of deep despair, while the end loans are played out.

Dengue Boy He plays this trick on the reverse side. This is a grimace that turns into a smile. This is a camera with a camera that rotates so many times that you are not sure if this is the director or the actor you watch, and in any case you feel Queasy or have you just had fun with excitement?

The strangeness is cut, rotated in a salad spinner and served with some indescribable rifle on top. It is delicious if you can stop it.