Napalm in the heart A novel

Gausch makes his English-language debut with this starkly beautiful postapocalyptic novel. The narrator ekes out an existence with his ailing mother, who used to work at a malevolent place called the Factory and is now "devoid of hope," in their wilderness refuge, where armed men hunt wild boars and police one another's movements. As a way to combat the ever-present "muteness of the dead," the narrator writes letters to his beloved, a photographer named Boris, confessing his feelings for Boris and expressing his distaste for their paramilitary society. After the narrator attacks another man out of fear for his own life, he flees, leaving behind his mother and reuniting with Boris. Together they join the ranks of survivors in makeshift settlements and attempt to evade an insurgent army that regularly carries out disappearances and interrogations. The fractured narrative, which unfolds like a series of prose poems, is intercut with Boris's abstract photographs, offering a record of their exodus and adding to the jagged testament to queer love. This is arresting. (Aug.)

A bleakly brilliant novel of a near future in which humankind has descended into unspeakable brutality. Catalan poet Guasch makes his fiction debut with this elegantly lyrical view of a world torn apart by an unspecified catastrophe: a plague, perhaps, or climate change. Either way, people hide in dark rooms during the day as wolves descend from the hills, "striding among the houses." The narrator has remained in his little sun-blasted village to take care of his mother, widowed after her husband's desperate suicide. Resigned to the world's terrors, Mom has taken up with a fascist beast whose "head is shaved, like all of them," servant of a new regime emblematized by a mysterious place called the Factory. The narrator, meanwhile, yearns for his boyfriend, Boris, to whom he writes lovely, evocative letters: "I love you the way we love those who've left long ago," he writes, "and those who haven't yet arrived…." Boris has relocated to a distant city where life is perhaps a tiny bit better--or so the narrator finds after, in a moment worthy of Cormac McCarthy on the one hand, he dispatches his mother's suitor and then, evoking Albert Camus on the other hand ("Mother died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don't know"), desultorily seeks a place to bury her after he reunites with Boris, a distant and often sullen young man who has his own priorities. Throw in a little Mad Max-ish chaos of roving gangs, and it's amazing that anyone or anything can survive, not to mention the narrator's love for Boris, which, he slyly notes, "dared not speak its name." Intimations of other European modernists--Schnurre, Dürrenmatt, Cela--resound quietly throughout a text punctuated by museum-worthy photographs to stunning, memorable effect. An extraordinarily beautiful depiction of an extraordinarily ugly--and wholly credible--world in the making. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.