‘Peace — slept for 14 hours. The roar of the sea slashing the rocks — is there any more soothing sound in the solar system?’ Although this observation was made by Chips Channon at Sandwich after the rigours of electioneering in 1935 it could be aptly cited in this novel by the radiation physicist Agustín Fernández Mallo. These past 15 years he has evolved a method in which, owing something to Borges and perhaps early Nicholson Baker, troubled narrators’ outlandish events draw seamlessly upon everything around them; on the page, advertising hoardings, the screen or mind, these fragments are shored against their ruins, catching our world in its present flux.
A narrator in The Things We’ve Seen ponders the use of red in films; the fact that, seen in black upon a map’s outline, the Bilbao Guggenheim resembles a gun as it fires a bullet (the accompanying photograph certainly makes one speculate about Frank Gehry’s subconscious); and, in bed on the Normandy coast, she adds:
There was nothing obstructing the keen wind, but it whistled and whispered by, creating sounds that seemed like words; I kept on hearing the word ‘marine’ and started repeating it to myself.
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