El gato y el espiral

by Luis Othoniel Rosa

Overview

'What I mean to say is that madness is a right.' So begins Animal Spiral, a utopian experimental novel that tells the story of the birth, life, and death of a collective consciousness called the Animal.The book narrates a tale about a world that is both desirable and terrifying over the next 377 years. It starts in the middle. In the Caribbean. It slowly follows the strict form of a narrative spiral through cycles of destruction. Then it moves back to our present so we can see our world becoming the other one. Its protagonist is a collective consciousness, the Animal. It is born. It grows and learns. It dies. It is mourned by cybernetic goddesses. It also screams: Loneliness is a collective disease! We defend our right to madness! Brave are not the ones who resist; brave are the ones who let go!

'What I mean to say is that madness is a right.' So begins Animal Spiral, a utopian experimental novel that tells the story of the birth, life, and death of a collective consciousness called the Animal.The book narrates a tale about a world that is both desirable and terrifying over the next 377 years. It starts in the middle. In the Caribbean. It slowly follows the strict form of a narrative spiral through cycles of destruction. Then it moves back to our present so we can see our world becoming the other one. Its protagonist is a collective consciousness, the Animal. It is born. It grows and learns. It dies. It is mourned by cybernetic goddesses. It also screams: Loneliness is a collective disease! We defend our right to madness! Brave are not the ones who resist; brave are the ones who let go!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781917260442
Publisher:	Charco Press
Publication date:	07/14/2026
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.00(d)
Language:	Spanish

About the Author

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Luis Othoniel Rosa (Bayamón, Puerto Rico, 1985) studied at the University of Puerto Rico and received a PhD from Princeton University. He is the author of the novels Otra vez me alejo (Argentina: Entropía, 2012; Puerto Rico: Isla Negra, 2013) and Caja de fractales (Argentina: Entropía, 2017; Puerto Rico: La Secta de los Perros, 2018). The latter was creatively translated into English as Down with Gargamel! (USA: Argos Books, 2020). He is also the author of Calima, a wild bilingual fiction (Spanish-English) in collaboration with various artists and translators (Puerto Rico: La Impresora, 2023) and of the academic book, Comienzos para una estética anarquista: Borges con Macedonio (Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2016; Argentina: Corregidor, 2020). He is the founding editor of www.ElRoommate.com.

Read an Excerpt

"The Sister has finished preparing the script for her prophetic YouTube video, ‘The Return of the Intergalactica’. Now she needs to go into the world and find actors. We shave our heads again. We raise our wet faces from the sink and look into the mirror. For a second, we don’t recognize the face looking back at her. The Sister? Or the Brother? We don’t know, and it matters that we don’t care. What looks back is something new. The connections have poisoned the past, all the living memories before connecting, the memory of our house, of our brother, all the memories feel like they are in black and white, like memories of a character in a novel. Death’s shadow approaches its definitive reality. The themes that organize her past life in that house with her brother keep coming back, but always rerouted. The spiraled memory reactivates. It remakes the past. It gives new meanings to her present crisis in cycles of future insurgencies. She is finally starting to understand. Such will be the story that just begins, a frenzy." (WORD p211)

"Ever since we woke up from the shutdown, we all have telempathic abilities, those that, centuries earlier, only the Intergalaticas possessed. Each one of we someones feel the strong emotions of anyone we previously connected with. During the shutdown, however, we were all connected to each other, so we all feel the strong emotions of each one of our 5 billion bodies. A cyclone of emotions. Some of we become meteorologists of these affective climates. We forecast, in detail, the emotional climate of the next few days based on an inexact science." (WORD p348)

Editorial Reviews

"In the tradition of the civilizational sagas of Isaac Asimov, and Kim Stanley Robinson, Rosa’s novel contemplates a future in which the collective replaces the individual as the locus of our most intimate desires and fears." —Jeff Lawrence, author of THE ANXIETIES OF EXPERIENCE: THE LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS FROM WHITMAN TO BOLAÑO

"One of the most brilliant young writers of our time." —Marta Aponte Alsina, author of LA MUERTE FELIZ DE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

"A master work capable of redeeming a broken world." —Carlos Fonseca, author of AUSTRAL

"Animal Spiral takes readers on a ride from the roots of human consciousness to modernity and beyond (…). More than science fiction, Animal Spiral is speculative anarchism with shades of Luisa Capetillo, William Burroughs and Octavia Butler." —"Dr. Michael Cucher, University of Puerto Rico"

From the Publisher