Bootes / Boötes
Novel , 2023
Navona
Pages: 1280
The novel that could have been co-written in perfect agreement by Franz Kafka, David Foster Wallace, Georges Perec and Groucho Marx.
With Boötes, Miquel de Palol culminates an ambitious, absolutely authentic literary project that is unparalleled in European literature. This dazzling novel follows the faltering steps of Artur, a technician hired to carry out repairs on the Archicenotaph on the Island of the Dead. It is a colossal, labyrinthine city-building, governed by a deranged bureaucracy, abstruse protocols and laws that are the fruit of the most hilarious improvisation or, perhaps, a perverse system that pushes its inhabitants to the very limits of sanity.
Bursting with delightful, devilish humour, Boötes unfolds before the reader as a highly intelligent allegory of power relations and the role of the individual under the yoke of a controlling organisation.