Every Arc Bends Its Radian

September 1, 2024
A genre-hopping sojourn in a Colombia both real and improbable. A New Jersey native of Colombian descent, de la Pava opens with a touch of the roman � clef: "The airport in Cali. It's been an era since I've been, so the sight of so many authorized machine guns unsettles at first." The story quickly morphs as the protagonist, Riv del R�o, is called on to exercise his skills as a private eye. He's an existential one at that, de la Pava seasoning his now-noirish broth with dashes of Roberto Bola�o and Arturo P�rez-Reverte: As Riv puts it, searching for documentation on the missing young woman he's been hired to find, "Mysteriously evanesce into invisibility one day and a single sheet of paper will replace you. And eventually no one will read it unless someone like me comes in and asks." That young woman is beautiful and brilliant, so much so that she scorns her MIT teachers with a taunting note on her thesis proposal: "I don't expect you to understand." Riv traces Angelica's disappearance to a preternaturally evil crime lord who, boasting of having killed God, is worshipped by minions and fed grapes by "barely clad women." Exeter Mondragon may be Satan in a caftan, but he's no match for Angelica, who turns up in a deus ex machina moment that recalls the bizarre science fiction conclusion of the film version of Peter H�eg's novelSmilla's Sense of Snow. Angelica, who's cooked up a program she calls Supra Hominin Cognition--don't ask--harbors plans that include the mass extermination of humankind, about which Riv muses, once the dust has settled, "Sure, she wanted to eradicate us all, but not like I'm perfect." Put on your seat belt for this weirdly imaginative yarn and its endless hairpin twists and turns.

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October 1, 2024

De La Pava (author of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award-winning A Naked Singularity) writes a literary and existential detective novel. Riv goes to Colombia, hoping for a break. Instead, he is asked to find the missing daughter of a family friend, but it is clear that the cops do not want the girl found and are in the pocket of a very dangerous man. Prepub Alert.

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October 15, 2024
A missing-person mystery careens into a vortex of grief, existential anxiety, and headspinning maximalist prose. Reeling from the sudden death of his girlfriend, Riv visits family in Colombia and sets to blotting away her memory by drinking the local aguardiente but gets sidetracked trying to find his vanished cousin Angelica, an MIT computer whiz. Amid a blur of digressions and disquisitions, Riv sleuths his way into the lair of Exeter Mondragon, a cartoonishly evil sociopath with gruesome plans to end Riv's suffering. When Angelica reappears, together with a deepsea submersible, a bigger and bleaker picture comes into view. Sacrificing narrative coherence for philosophical banter and handbrake plot twists, De la Pava (Lost Empress, 2018) reiterates his commitment to the sprawling, exuberant aesthetics of the encyclopedic novel. But this one is much shorter and darker than his earlier works, and its manic resistance to comprehension seems designed to make a point about the bewilderment of humanity in the age of artificial intelligence. Its best moments are the (rare) quiet ones, where the narrator simply allows himself to be overcome by feelings of loss.

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October 21, 2024
What begins as a familiar PI tale morphs into a Pynchonesque nightmare in this confounding concoction from de la Pava (Lost Empress). Riv del Rio has come from New York City to Cali, Colombia, to escape a recent trauma. He quickly reconnects with his cousin Mauro and an older family friend named Carlotta, who asks Riv, a self-described “poet/philosopher/private eye,” to track down her missing daughter, Angelica. With Mauro’s help, Riv determines that Angelica is being held by Exeter Mondragon, a sadistic crime lord with a self-stated mission to “deepen despair, misery, horror.” Though Riv acknowledges he stands little chance of rescuing Angelica, he enters Mondragon’s lair and is promptly captured, with Mondragon laying out an elaborate plan to torture and kill him over the course of 18 hours. Mondragon’s agenda changes, however, when Angelica reemerges, and the story takes a hard turn into the realm of speculative fiction. The narrative momentum is frequently stalled by Riv’s philosophical musings (“Whenever illegitimate power is exercised, the universe grants us the opposite power to author its disruption”), and readers looking for a straightforward mystery will be frustrated by de la Pava’s hodgepodge of moods and genres. Still, there’s no denying that this bizarre detective story holds a hypnotizing power all its own.