People talking in their sleep

Luciano Lamberti

SHORT STORIES. PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, 2022. 336 PAGES.

With a wide range of plots and a powerful, clear, simple style, these three story collections interrogate, delve into and decipher what we call reality: town streets and country roads, boredom, behaviours predictable and unimaginable. Their characters - domesticated by work, school, the dogma of masculinity, families and partners - resist and relieve their boredom with sex, play, and different forms of acceptance. Or rebellion.

Luciano Lamberti's masterful prose strings together detail after detail, intimacy after intimacy until one begins to suspect that something remarkable is on its way. With lyrical descriptions, subtle dialogue and a sharp sense of humour, the author of People Who Talk in Their Sleep - which includes the unpublished Petty Thefts in the Moonlight and the currently unavailable The Pig Murderer and The Parrot that Could Predict the Future - plays the role of omnipotent, benevolent creator with brilliant comic wit and sagacious observation.

‘With macabre irony, Lamberti tunes into the nightmares of the Pampas and makes the idea of small-town hell palpably real. His characters barely notice their descent into cruelty, their wrong turns, the way that their frustrations turn into delirium. These are earth-shattering tales of terror but also demonstrations of what terror can do to minds congealed by boredom, rumours, prejudice and routine.'

Federico Falco

 

‘He's not just a clever storyteller, Luciano Lamberti is also wild and sensitive, like the literature we like to read and experience. Well, maybe not experience.'

Mariano Quirós


‘The trilogy - for the moment anyway - of The Murderer, The Parrot and The Eucalyptus House condenses with its different styles and methods a set of stories as Argentinian as Borges would have wanted, which is to say universal.'

Sebastián Rodríguez Mora, Crisis


‘There are the characters, caught up in hopeless emotional sorrows, living like parasites with dysfunctional families knowing that when the sun comes up tomorrow, nothing will have changed.'

Maximiliano Tomas

 

PUBLISHED BY: Spanish PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE 

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