"Skilfully composed, cohering into a lucent, compelling narrative . . . This profoundly strange and beautiful, formally bold and lyrically elevated novel gives the reader compelling storytelling and a space in which to think about love, freedom and survival, and a future to which we might be heading." —David Hayden, The Guardian
"Written in lyrical, if brutal, fragments . . . the beauty of [Guasch's] prose shores up his story, in which language, love, family, and home are in constant peril." —The New Yorker (Briefly Noted)
"[Napalm in the Heart] compels the reader to take in every single word. To focus and appreciate all the beauty and the horror that Guasch has so meticulously observed . . . Guasch’s novel is not simply another work of sad-man-lit (a term I like to use for a recent trend in literature of books written by men in minor keys) but something much rarer and more exciting: a world seen through the eyes of a writer who is not afraid of his own imagination." —Katharina Volckmer, Los Angeles Review of Books
"The bare facts are ghoulishly extreme, yet disbelief is suspended as in a fairy tale . . . The grotesque acquires peculiar beauty thanks to the narrowness of the imagery, restricted to evocations of carnality and death: viscosity, sickly phosphorescence and greedy voids, juxtaposed with a matter-of-factness that makes horror ordinary." —Lorna Scott Fox, TLS
"A strange and capricious creature . . . visually rich and almost lyrical . . . deeply rewarding in its relentless commitment to Guasch’s fragmented vision of a ragged world segmented by borders, both inside and out." —Alexis Ong, Reactor
"A haunting and inventive debut novel . . . Politically wistful, brimming with queer desire, this novel evokes an end of days which might not be far beyond us." —Andrés Ordorica, The Skinny (UK)
"The novel is made up of short, succinct passages of poetic prose that cut straight to the heart of every thought and emotion . . . A beautiful and affecting debut novel that often finds moments of beauty in a setting so wholly devoid of it." —Barry Pierce, Big Issue (UK)
"[Guasch] seeks out this tension between violence and tenderness, between the degeneration of a broken world and the traces of humanity that still exist in it . . . [Napalm in the Heart is] a poet’s novel—for better, not for worse. Brimming with energy, what buoys it are clever ideas and some beautiful turns of phrase, deftly translated from the Catalan by Maya Faye Lethem." —Pablo Scheffer, The Telegraph (UK)
"Napalm in the Heart is a hard book to describe; that’s what makes it so powerful. Fleetingly, I was reminded of Tarkovsky’s Stalker – the narrator and Boris’s road trip into a world bleached of life and vibrancy–and the confessional poems of John Berryman – particularly ‘‘Dream Song 235’’ – and the work of W.G. Sebald – scattered in the second half of the novel are these gorgeous black-and-white photos taken by Boris, all chiaroscuro and mood – but mainly I was gripped by a work that stands alone, that’s strange and sad and beautiful." —Locus
"Bleakly brilliant [and] elegantly lyrical . . . Worthy of Cormac McCarthy on the one hand [and] evoking Albert Camus on the other . . . [Napalm in the Heart is] an extraordinarily beautiful depiction of an extraordinarily ugly—and wholly credible—world in the making.” —Kirkus (starred review)
"Starkly beautiful . . . 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.” —Publishers Weekly
"Reading this book was an out-of-body experience. Set in the near future, life as we know it is over. Something devastating happened and Guasch drops readers right in it. The book is a meditation on survival told very artfully. It felt so safe but also so dangerous at the same time. It may be about the end of the world, but it felt like the beginning of something new. I must read more Guasch." —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
"Pol Guasch must be one of the best young writers working today. This novel is entirely resolute and clear-hearted." —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X
"Pol Guasch creates an atmosphere that is menacing and powerfully dramatic, but he is also a poet who is interested in image and tone, in texture and rhythmic variation. This mixture gives his innovative and original novel a mesmeric force, wonderfully captured in this translation." —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
"Pol Guasch has written a punk novel whose title quotes Iggy Pop's 'heart full of napalm,' but there is no rock here and no animal roaming the streets. We instead find ourselves in a mysterious world of the future, or of the past. It is a world of desire and survival, in the aftermath of an apocalypse marked by different languages, obscure repression, and prose as mysterious as it is beautiful." —Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night
"Eerie and compelling, Napalm in the Heart retains its mystery without sacrificing any of its dramatic action. A gripping debut." —Nicole Flattery, author of Nothing Special
"Pol Guasch has crafted in his story a struggle for existence that never gives up on his characters' dreams. Napalm in the Heart challenges the boundaries between delicacy and brutality, creating an unforgettable novel in the process." —Alejandro Zambra, author of Chilean Poet
"Napalm in the Heart is a lyrical gut-punch of a novel about one man’s search for purpose at the bitter end of a bitterer world. As I followed the unnamed narrator’s journey across post-apocalyptic ruins and militarized borders—meeting his forbidden lover, mourning the dead, and witnessing his increasingly brutal acts of violence—I came to see anew the horror of our own political present. In this book, Pol Guasch has given us a ruthless and appropriately deranged reminder to fight." —Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
"What is the language of love? What is the grammar of survival? Pol Guasch sketches a beautiful response to these urgent questions, weaving a powerful tale of desire and resistance in which an old world is mourned and a new world is imagined. Reading this book is like traversing a dark forest and spotting, when night seemed to devour it all, the light of the fireflies as the glimmer of hope. A beautiful tale of survival, love and resistance." —Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral
★ 2024-05-31
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 littleMad 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.
