Philosophical Toys

by Susana Medina

Overview

Nina, a drifter from southern Spain comes to London in search of experience, only to find that the strangest of stories is hiding in her father's loft in America...

A playfully concocted, fast-paced novel committed to the irresistible pleasure of reading, both a celebration and a critique of our relationship to objects (from fetishes, to curios, to commodities, to objectum sexuality, to our becoming cyborgs through our addiction to technology), Philosophical Toys travels through different times, countries and experiences as chance leads Nina to encounter time and again the enigmatic nature of things, which end up transforming her into that most rare of species: a female philosopher.

Witty and elegiac, Philosophical Toys takes the reader on a tour of fetishism, late capitalist culture, Buñuel's films, psychoanalysis, Alzheimer's disease, as well as the avatars of belonging to two cultures, an experience increasingly shared by a myriad of expatriates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628975918
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	07/15/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256

About the Author

Susana Medina is the author of Red Tales (bilingual edition, co-translated with Rosie Marteau), the poetry and aphorisms collection Souvenirs del Accidente and the short films Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys and Leather-bound Stories (co-directed with Derek Ogbourne). She has been awarded The Max Aub International Short Story Prize and a writing grant from the Arts Council of England for her novel Spinning Days of Night. Her story “Oestrogen,” translated by Rosie Marteau, featured in Best European Fiction, 2014, from Dalkey Archive Press.

Editorial Reviews

"A prose both spare and lush, a commendable tension about the enterprise." —Will Self

"A shockingly beautiful innovative voice in which the sublime and laughter are perfectly matched." —Andrew Gallix

"Medina’s oeuvre mistranslates that of Borges. It is Borges’s notion of mistranslation at work throughout. In the mode of Angela Carter and all those fantastic girls dallying in their bloody chambers. the trim metaphysical gestures and summarised plots contained in Medina’s work re-render the marvelousness of fairy stories. The luminescent Marina Warner would feel most at home here." —Richard Marshal, 3:AM Magazine

"Susana Medina’s teasing tale leads us into a labyrinth of interlinked questions, an echo-chamber of deceptive answers. Rather like the fetishism that is its guiding thread, the novel operates an endless deferral of meaning through a series of bewitching substitutes. The quest to understand the possibly shoe-centred relationship of her parents plunges the narrator into adventures, encounters and reflections—in both senses—that encompass ghost-writing and forgery, orthopedics and vagina dentata, Buñuel and Freud, amid visits to nursing homes, the art world, S&M clubs and toyshops. Like her narrator, Medina is a Spaniard in London whose rich yet unfathomably offbeat language voices a mix of satire, comedy and philosophy propelled by a disarmingly down-to-earth plot involving bedsits and money worries. This is ultimately a story about tenderness, for both people and the objects they live through; a novel of ideas rooted in the senses, glittering, strange and humane." —Lorna Scott Fox, London Review of Books

From the Publisher

[Medina's] stories are full of literary and pop-cultural references: Rousseau, Cocteau and Shakespeare jostle for space alongside Madonna, Michael Jackson and Pope John Paul II.... The prose, ambiguous and paratactic, is reminiscent of the Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela.

Times Literary Supplement

2015-04-01
Family histories, cinematic obsessions, fractured relationships, and the films of Luis Buñuel converge in this pensive novel set in London and Spain. The plot of Medina's novel, which abounds with references to art, cinema, and literature, takes a little while to get going. When it does, however, the story it tells is a powerful and mysterious one. The novel is structured as the reminiscences of Nina, a Spanish woman living in London, looking back at a period of her life lasting several years. ("I was in time to witness the last vestiges of the punk civilization," she writes early on.) Concerns over Nina's father's health lead her to find a mysteriously vast archive of shoes kept by her late mother, who had worked as an actress for a time. And what emerges slowly from this is a web of obsessions and fetishes, from the wealthy collector gathering props from the films of surrealist film giant Buñuel to the shoe and foot fetishes that turn up in some of Buñuel's films to the unknowable desires of Nina's parents. Throughout the novel, primal desires and heady discussions of artistic theory exist in a state of relative balance. One character is described as "an emissary of sensuality whose rubbery mouth was an unaware conduit for unusual unconscious ticks." And at one point, Nina describes a particularly charged scene in the city: "I drifted along libidinal streets, sinister streets, listless streets...." These moments are balanced with lengthy musings on art, memory, and philosophy—which, given the occupations of many of the characters, seems entirely fitting. This novel's headiness might seem daunting, but readers who take a patient approach will find a deeply rewarding and often haunting narrative emerge.

Kirkus Reviews