Created by Sergio de la Pava
“Waking life in Cali, for me, has many dreamlike qualities. So opening may eyes isn’t clearly a return to reality from imagination.”
Be forewarned: it’s being touted as “an existential detective novel.”
I mean, really. Just look at that title…
It begins with broody, moody New Yorker RIV del RIO (he describes himself as a “poet/philosopher/private eye,”) getting off a plane in Cali, Columbia, ostensibly to visit family. But we soon discover he’s actually put the Big Apple in the rear view, fleeing his “debtor’s prison of an apartment,” after a string of really bad luck which may (or may) not have attracted the unwanted attention of organized crime.
Mauro, a well-meaning cousin, soon hooks him up with a wandering daughter job. Carlotta, a wealthy friend of the family, wants Riv to find her daughter Angelica Alfa-Ochoa, a brilliant twenty-two-year-old MIT student. Riv, more familiar with cheating spouses, nonetheless diligently works the case; following the paper trail, tracking down witnesses and suspects, while offering assorted philosophical digressions along the way.
But eventually Riv cracks the case. Or sort of. It seems Angelica has been taken prisoner by Exeter Mondragon, a powerful local crime lord who’s about as twisted and perverted as they come — so feared that people are reluctant to speak his name aloud.
Rev and Mauro’s attempt to rescue the girl from Mondragon’s headquarters fails spectacularly, and Riv is taken prisoner by the sadistic mobster, which is when the story lights out for the territories, hop, skip and jumping between genres, hopping the rails from straight thriller into gauzy metafiction; part horror, part sci-fi and part philosophical shuck-and-jive.
Yet through it all, Riv remains an engaging detective (despite his reluctant proclamation that he’s “not an especially good one”), and the book is hard to put down. There’s some really great use of local color and culture, splattered with Spanish, and Riv, an oddly effective detective, proves to be a great narrator of his own story, his hard-boiled cynicism sharp and cutting, the usual P.I. antics slapped down beside his open-ended philosophical musings—somewhat akin to Doc Sportello in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. You may scratch your head.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sergio de la Pava is the author of Lost Empress, Personae, and the legal thriller A Naked Singularity, probably his best-known work, for which he won the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Fiction. He was born and raised in New Jersey, to parents who had immigrated from Colombia. He attended Brooklyn Law School, and works as a public defender in Manhattan, handlings 70 to 80 cases at a time. He says of that work, “The stakes are a lot higher in that world than whether or not my book gets attention. On a given day, I have someone who really needs my help on a serious matter.” He lives in New Jersey with his wife and their two children.
THE EVIDENCE
- “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.”
- “Is freedom even a good?”
- “Whenever illegitimate power is exercised, the universe grants us the opposite power to author its disruption”
- “The relationship between the incidental and the momentous exists outside the scope of recollection”
UNDER OATH
- “(Every Arc Bends Its Radian) reads a bit like if Raymond Chandler and Jules Verne dropped acid together and started contemplating the nature of evil and the future of artificial intelligence. Summarizing any de la Pava novel—where formal hijinks abound and digressions range from The Honeymooners to theoretical physics—in one sentence feels almost obscenely reductive, but even those bare-bones descriptions make clear that this is not a writer in search of approval.”
— Publishers Weekly - “De La Pava’s commitment to ideas — their creation and their interrogation — is so fervid that it lights up his prose. … It’s invigorating to be dropped in the middle of such an effort and to feel that whatever we might guess is coming next, the truth is likely to be much, much stranger.”
— The New York Times - … cuts a heady and frequently funny path through travelogue, horror, and sci-fi. Like some postmodern Poe bringing news of the maelstrom, Every Arc Bends Its Radian offers a wild ride to ‘the innermost heart of reality.’”
— Garth Risk Hallberg
NOVELS
- Every Arc Bends Its Radian (2024) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- “Oh, Mama, I got the post-modern metafictional blues again…”
Who reads this stuff?
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
