The eighth wonder

Vlady Kociancich

NOVEL. NEW EDITION. UNAM, 2020. 273 PAGES

In the prologue to this novel, Adolfo Bioy Casares describes it as part of the tradition of fantasy novels ‘that are often adventures in the philosophical imagination'. The account that the protagonist and narrator Alberto Paradella feels forced to share to try and make sense of his bewilderment begins with a deeply ordinary life spent in his studio pretending to write a novel to escape from himself and the woman he loves only to end up confusing two superimposed cities, the story he tells during a delirious fever and a woman who has mysteriously appeared from out of nowhere. He is, as Bioy Casares says: ‘a hero who has mislaid his world, his old, familiar neighbourhood, only to rediscover it in remote lands.' However, the cracks in the reality of Kociancich's novel are enormously subtle. This is not so much a genre cross-over as, as she says herself: ‘A metaphorical key to the discovery that this world, this life, isn't as solid, firm or stable as we like to think.'

"For me, the most extraordinary find in recent years has been Vlady Kociancich's The Eighth Wonder."
Adolfo Bioy Casares

PUBLISHED BY: Spanish UNAM | English worldwide SEVEN STORIES

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