09/28/2020
The playful, surreal collection from Mexican writer Herbert (Tomb Song) evokes a version of contemporary Mexico where pretentious critics and conceptual artists rub up against ultra-violent drug cartel leaders. In the title story, a cheerfully verbose film scholar and Tarantino fan is kidnapped by a drug lord who looks exactly like the director and wants Tarantino dead, but not before learning as much as he can about Tarantino from the narrator. Those who know how to manipulate words and ideas tend to come out on top, such as the ghostwriter in the wry and scatological “The Ballad of Mother Teresa of Calcutta” who conceives a fiendish plan to punish the clients who neglect to pay him. Herbert ventures into fantasy in several of the stories, including the dark “Z,” in which most of the population of Mexico City—apart from the narrator and a few others—is in one stage or another of turning into “nascent vegetal man-eaters in a perpetual and pestilential state of putrefaction.” While not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, Herbert’s stories use a light touch to explore the dilemma of the intellectual enmeshed in a crudely vicious world. This provocatively cerebral volume should amuse those with a taste for literary horror. (Nov.)
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino is an ambitious, generous boon. While this deliberately challenging read might turn off a casual reader, Herbert’s parody of Tarantino’s style and MacSweeney’s lively translation chart unmarked territory for other artists to explore. This book does future writers a kindness: Herbert is practically begging to be turned into kitsch.”—Ploughshares
“Whether he’s writing unpredictable fiction or exploring discomfiting moments in history, Julián Herbert is a relentless chronicler of human complexity. With his latest book, the memorably-titled Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, Herbert shows what he can do within the realm of short fiction, providing another demonstration of his abilities as a writer.”—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Electrifying. . . . Reunited with award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney, Herbert presents 10 stories ready to disturb, quite possibly even disgust. That said, even for the most reluctant readers, the surprisingly immersive humor and slyly playful wit make resistance futile.”—Shelf Awareness
“Herbert . . . is a deft explorer of the darker corners of Mexican society. . . . The title story is a tour de force. . . . [Herbert is] a writer worth seeking out.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The playful, surreal collection from Mexican writer Herbert evokes a version of contemporary Mexico where pretentious critics and conceptual artists rub up against ultra-violent drug cartel leaders. . . . Herbert’s stories use a light touch to explore the dilemma of the intellectual enmeshed in a crudely vicious world. This provocatively cerebral volume should amuse those with a taste for literary horror.”—Publishers Weekly
“Explosive, visceral, and impossible to forget.”—Booklist
“[A] rising star. . . . [Julián Herbert] absolutely nails sour, blustery men. . . . The results are both entertaining and corrosive, disturbing and socially relevant, sordid and sleekly accomplished.”—Library Journal
09/01/2020
One thing you can say about rising-star Mexican author Herbert (Tomb Song): he absolutely nails sour, blustery men who lack idealism and gravitas and aren't as cool as they believe yet instinctively feel passed by. The results are both entertaining and corrosive, disturbing and socially relevant, sordid and sleekly accomplished. A consultant who packages personal memoirs explains how he reworked the story of a disgraced Mexican businessman, with both the real and manufactured versions unpalatable in different ways. A performance artist who films himself having sex with HIV-positive prostitutes scorns his family and spouts troglodyte values ("I hate LGBTQ activists: they are all just closet nuns") while admitting he's doing it for the money. As with many of Herbert's characters, his cynicism is almost refreshing; he's one-upping corporate greed and elite conceit. VERDICT Both author and characters see how far they can go (pretty far) in an edgy collection that will be a lightning rod for venturesome readers.
2020-09-02
A gathering of often loopy, sometimes Rabelaisian stories by Mexican postmodernist Herbert.
Herbert, lead singer in a rock band in Saltillo, Mexico, is a deft explorer of the darker corners of Mexican society: His characters smoke crack, have unprotected sex with HIV-positive partners while making “gonzo porn movies,” drink far too much, exhibit poor manners. One even throws up on Mother Teresa, “a thick stream of puke composed of partially digested clams and wine that falls onto the extended hand and spotless headdress of the damned old witch crammed to the brim with lepers.” It’s decidedly not the polite, elevated world of Carlos Fuentes, and its layerings are less those of social class, as with Fuentes, than of degrees of criminality. In one story, for instance, a journalist seeking a source of funding for his crack habit of “between twenty and thirty rocks a week” engineers a speaking gig in a border town in a scheme that comes to involve the Secretariat of Public Education, the mayor, and a host of other figures—and, in the end, a lot more money than the journalist ever dreamed of. The story ends in a spasm of violence, the journalist in hiding, living with “a toothless junkie twenty years my junior.” The title story is a tour de force of unlikely circumstance in which a hapless film critic is press-ganged into a mission to decapitate the famed director for an inadvertent error involving the doppelgänger of a fearsome cartel boss. Punctuated by passages in which the critic spins out a theory of parody that involves such highbrow figures as Hermann Broch and Harold Bloom, the yarn eventually finds that boss, Jacobo Montaña (think Scarface), in jail and his henchmen Rosendo and Gildardo (think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) dead. As with a Tarantino film, the explanation for how all that has come about is serpentine, goofy, and good fun, if spattered with blood, all pushing the envelope of probability.
A writer worth seeking out, even for Tarantino aficionados.
