When the world falls apart, only love remains.

Venice, sometime in the 21st century. Humanity is unknowingly heading towards extinction as a couple wander through the city, oblivious to the signs that herald the end of society as we know it. He is a Latin teacher enjoying a sabbatical year; she is a writer working on a book that brings together all the different forms of love. Without knowing it, they are both destined to play a pivotal role in the new world that emerges from the collapse. The Book of All Loves (“El libro de todos los amores”) is a novel about love, the great subject that has preoccupied artists, scientists and thinkers since the dawn of time. Or rather, it is a book about the micro-loves that surround us, and an enquiry into the different dynamics that love adopts, both in the intimate sphere of the couple and in other aspects of public life such as politics, economics or science.

Playing with styles and genres, skilfully mixing fiction, poetry and essay, Agustín Fernández Mallo has written a fascinating philosophical novel that radically believes in hope from the dystopia of the present.

In his novel Limbo, Fernández Mallo takes the reader on a fascinating road trip. Looking for the enigmatic “Sound of the End”, a Spanish man and his Mexican girlfriend, a former kidnap victim, cross the United States from east to west coast. Meanwhile, two musicians have the chance of theirs lives to record a CD. But the producer’s house in Brittany seems to hide a terrible secret. Creating an exciting and poetic atmosphere, Fernández Mallo connects his characters as if they were in a net, taking his readers to a place in limbo where it is hard to tell the present from the past, one place from the other, life from death. But it isn’t mystery that grips us, but something far more disturbing: reality.

When Nocilla Dream, the first part of a trilogy that can be read separately, erupted energetically onto the Spanish literary scene, it attracted enormous interest for both critics and the general public alike. It is considered an ‘alternative’ or post-modern novel, with a lopsided narrative that neither begins, nor ends. This isn’t literature as we have hardly ever seen it before, but rather a sort of elaborate collage of extracts.

In Nocilla Experience, the second part of the trilogy, multiple voices are distributed throughout the 112 fragments that make up the novel, from Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy or Woody Allen’s Annie Hall to scientific theories by Newton and Einstein. Distinct excerpts interweave and begin to form a patchwork of coincidences and complementary snippets of information that expose the solitude of the protagonists. Absolutely anything can be narrative material; anything other than boredom.

The first part of Nocilla Lab tells the story of the birth of the trilogy through an internal monologue that develops into a stream of consciousness from the protagonist. After being knocked down by a motorbike during a trip in Thailand, Agustín Fernández Mallo was left bedridden for four weeks and had the opportunity to divulge his experiences in this tripartite account. Seven years later, when he travels with his girlfriend to Cerdena, they come across an old penitentiary that has been converted into an agri-tourism site. A memory of reading Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance in Portuguese and a ‘No entry’ sign bring the first part of the story to a close. In the second part, the author’s voice disappears and gives way to a fragmented account that is accompanied by a succession of drawings, sketches and quotes about some of the characters inside the penitentiary. The third part of the book is a succession of post poetic flashes and varied etymologies – both ironic and distant – aside tributes to García Márquez, Wittgenstein, and Duras. The language adopts almost the tone of a comic and finishes with an encounter between Enrique Vila-Matas and the author on an oil rig.

I Always Return to the Nipples and to Proposition 7 of the Tractatus (“Yo siempre regreso a los pezones y al punto 7 del Tractatus”) is an intelligent and enjoyable soliloquy on the subjects of this world, starting from the loss of love and spanning all the way to language and its limits, which are perhaps also the limits of our own experience.