NOVELS
We Are Not But We Are
Mirroring our times, this is a fictional account of a man who, upon crossing a street, enters an irregular universe where purposefulness is only apparent. Instead of dealing with a single possible reality, he begins to accept the alluring indeterminacy in stochastic or random processes. His meditative search breaks the arrow of time and leads him to conceive of the world as having alternating layers of causality and chaos. He finally sees his own reflection in the expressionless face of a woman whose chant helps him break the circle of fate.
Published by Spuyten Duyvil Press
Touch That Which We Cannot Possess
Starting from its mysterious crib in 17th century Venice, a violin journeys through the New York City subway and the concert halls of Europe in the hands of a contemporary string quartet. It searches for its identity, a chance to touch immortality, and its ever-eluding object of desire. Narrated from the violin’s point of view, the novel shows how a violin deals with contemporary questions of power and inequality: Can evil and marvel coexist as one? Can the desire to destroy turn into a desire to love within seconds? How are the sounds of human bodies different from the sounds of instruments? Should we use the same notes to write the music of immortality and the music of love? And from the hands that play the violin to the hands that abuse it, we finally discover who plays whom.
The Spiral of Words
An intrepid writer undertakes a long walk towards the ocean where he hopes to source the essential and immortal words he yearns for. Along the way, he traverses the streets of Nice, Lisbon, Cádiz and Marrakech where he confronts the shapes and shadows that harbor his inner fears and desires. His reality then collides with the elliptical passage of the mythical man in the striped tunic. The two minds create a spiral of words spawning a narrative that emboldens the writer and unearths the past of the striped tunic. With this novel, the STRIPED TUNIC TRILOGY comes full circle. The two previous novels are AIR and THE ROAR OF THE RIVER. The sense of words and language as primal utterance in this trilogy shows the American mindset refracted into many other peoples in this now world.
The Roar of the River
Set in a perched village of the French Alps, between a roaring river and the moonlight, a man dressed in a striped tunic seeks refuge from his dying past. Instead, he encounters an iconoclastic set of characters that offer him love, instigate fear, explore the meaning of language, and elicit revenge. Following the musical structure of the 17th-century fugue, the narrative voices succeed each other until coming together in a polyphonic search for light among the darkness of their origins.
AIR
The strange and unexpected behaviors of the four main characters reveal the illusory idea of trying to apprehend one’s identity. Imena, a student of perfumery, arrives in Marrakech in an attempt to free herself from the overbearing intensity of her boyfriend Patricio, a philosophy professor at l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. She takes residence behind the red door of an allegorical hotel whose attendant, the striped tunic, officiates life under an aura of mysticism and danger. René, Patricio’s junior colleague, decides to leave for Guadeloupe in search for his gender identity, a painful and transformative search that delivers him beyond himself. After Imena secludes herself in her hotel room trying to complete her ultimate perfume creation, the four individual lives finally coalesce in the courtyard where four flowering orange trees witness the thaumaturgy.
The Striped Tunic Trilogy
Originally published sequentially as AIR (2016), The Roar of the River (2017) and The Spiral of Words (2019), the trilogy has since been collected into a single volume.
The Book of I
The Book of I is the story of Teaston, a painter struggling with schizophrenia, who finds himself at the edge of a cliff, at the edge of his life. The novel explores our fragmented human nature through the distorted lens that Teaston provides. Some characters are undoubtedly real while others become figments of Teaston’s imagination, yet others defy authorial certitude by remaining in a sort of reality twilight. As metaphorical vehicles, the themes and characters in the novel raise questions about the nature of identity. And from under a chorus/amalgam of voices and delusions, Teaston raises to discover what it means to be a person, what makes us human.
The narrative is undoubtedly influenced by the formal spontaneity of Cortazar’s Hopscotch, the shifting levels of reality of Kafka’s The Trial, the iconoclastic characterization of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and the interiority and lyricism of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
The Book of I received Honorable Mention in the 2015 ILBA for Best Novel in the popular fiction category.