Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

Overview

When Lucas Giraut inherits the family company from a father who never really cared enough to get to know him, it comes with a lot of unanswered questions...and an archenemy: Lucas's mother, Fanny. An ambitious and ruthless entrepreneur, Fanny believes her son is as useless as his father, whose recent, mysterious death delights her. Determined to understand exactly what he's been bequeathed, Lucas follows clues found in a windowless secret apartment—and in his dreams—deep in Barcelona's underworld and far from the comforts of his home, a former ducal palace. Meanwhile, Valentina Parini—a precocious and troubled seventh-grader and the self-proclaimed Top European Expert on the Work of Stephen King—looks to Lucas, her upstairs neighbor and only friend, as she struggles with growing up.

Javier Calvo's Wonderful World is a haunting tale that entwines reality and fantasy, filled with scandalous behavior and dangerous crimes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061557699
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/23/2010
Series:	P.S. Series
Pages:	470
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

A screenwriter and a book collector, Javier Calvo is the author of four works of fiction. Wonderful World is his English-language debut. He divides his time between Barcelona and Brooklyn, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Wonderful World

Chapter One

The Attack of the Low-Flying Airplanes

"Twenty-three days till the world release of Stephen King's new novel," says twelve-year-old Valentina Parini, lying in her hammock in the courtyard of the former ducal palace in Barcelona's Old Quarter, a building the tour guides call the Palau de la Mar Fosca, the Palace of the Stormy Sea. With a plaid blanket over her legs. She is holding up the promotional brochure for Stephen King's new novel so that Lucas Giraut can see it. "Or, to be more precise, twenty-three days and six hours."

Rays of late-afternoon sun fall on the balconies of the Old Quarter like the remains of a space shuttle that has disintegrated in the stratosphere. Valentina Parini, a troubled student in the seventh grade at Barcelona's Italian Academy and self-proclaimed Top European Expert on the Work of Stephen King, sways in her hammock with a pensive expression on her face. For a couple of weeks now, every time she looks at something, one of her eyes seems to stray slightly toward the edge of her visual field. Giraut takes the promotional brochure for Stephen King's new novel without getting up from his white plastic garden chair. The skyline from the edge of the yard shows one tower of the cathedral covered in scaffolding and a flock of seagulls that soar in voracious circles around some invisible prey.

Valentina Parini lives with her mother in an apartment on the first floor of the former ducal place. Lucas Giraut lives in the apartment on the second floor. The courtyard, the marble staircase and the parking area on the lower level are common space for all residents.

"Myschool psychologist told me I'm not allowed to read Stephen King's new novel," continues Valentina Parini. Her skinny preteen body, with its excessively long arms and legs, contrasts with her round face and tiny features that make you think of tropical tree-dwelling monkeys. Her nose is so small that the fact that it can sustain her child-sized eyeglasses, with their green plastic frames, strikes Giraut as a true gravitational feat. "Says that reading it could be very negative for me. She sent a note to my teacher and to my mom." The lips of her tiny mouth purse in a disgusted expression. "She even told my basketball coach. What a huge bitch."

Seated on his garden chair, Lucas Giraut, thirty-three years of age, pulls a cigarette out of the silver case embossed with the initials LG that he always carries in the inside pocket of his suit. His suit today is a charcoal gray Lino Rossi with red pinstripes. As he lights the cigarette he furrows his vaguely namby-pamby eyes and his pale, thin eyebrows. Valentina Parini's school psychologist is one of the most frequent topics of conversation at the afternoon meetings Valentina and Giraut hold in the backyard of the ducal palace. Valentina's clinical relationship with the school psychologist dates back to the episode known at her school as the Spanish Class Mishap.

"It's called Wonderful World," says Valentina. Pointing with her head at the promotional brochure for Stephen King's new novel that Giraut has in his hands. "It's the story of a man that wakes up one day and discovers that everything around him has turned perfect. The neighbors that used to hate him now give him baseball tickets. His coworkers are friendly to him. His ex-wife, too. Everything has turned perfect. The world starts functioning flawlessly. Wars end. Politicians turn smart. Which means something's going on." She's not trying to sound mysterious or showing any traces of preteen excitement. She's just using the natural, confident tone of someone who knows she's the Top European Expert on the Work of Stephen King. "Something alien. Something that is controlling people's minds."

"When I was your age, I wrote a novel, too." Lucas Giraut looks at the promotional brochure under the courtyard's late-afternoon light. On the cover of the pamphlet it says "Wonderful World, by Stephen King" and "Worldwide Release December 22." Giraut takes a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. "It wasn't a novel like yours, or like Stephen King's. Really, it wasn't exactly a novel. It was about Apartment Thirteen. I don't know why it's called that. In my family they've always called it that. It's a room in the floor above the place where I work. My father used to go there to hide from my mother, I think. Anyway, I was obsessed with Apartment Thirteen. I dreamed about that place night after night. In my dreams it was much bigger than it really is. It had antique lamps and rooms filled with antiques. And endless hallways." He looks up toward the Palau de la Mar Fosca. "I still have that novel in my files. I remember that it filled a lot of notebooks. That's how I spent all my time as a kid. Filling notebooks. With drawings and things I wrote. And in the notebooks I have all sorts of drawings of Apartment Thirteen. I mean, the way I imagined it then. Which is nothing like how it really is. I didn't actually get to see it until after my father died. And it turned out to be just a small, windowless room. Because of my father's illness, you remember. The problem he had with windows."

Marcia Parini's voice is heard, slightly occluded by the smoke extractor, as it comes from the window of the kitchen of the lower level of the house.

"Lucas? Is she bothering you?" she asks in a distracted tone of voice. Above the double acoustic cushion created by the smoke extractor and the spluttering of the crêpes on the grill. "Would you like a crêpe?"

Wonderful World. Copyright © by Javier Calvo. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

What People are Saying About This

Clive Barker

“Javier Calvo’s Wonderful World is a unique, visionary novel: verbally magical, funny, and full of old-fashioned sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. This is the work of a marvelous literary talent.”

Editorial Reviews

A frenetic and magnificent mashup of family drama, mob revenge story, and surreal mystery. . . . A fast-moving narrative overflowing with hilarious situations.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Javier Calvo’s Wonderful World is a unique, visionary novel: verbally magical, funny, and full of old-fashioned sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. This is the work of a marvelous literary talent.” — Clive Barker

“Surreal, sexy, wildly funny, self-indulgent, and wretchedly excessive . . . has all the earmarks of a cult favorite in the making.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Javier Calvo claims to have channeled the ghost of Charles Dickens to write this postmodern thriller, and the young Spanish author tells his tale with enough brio— the cartoonish cast includes Pink Floyd-obsessed gansters and plastic-surgery-maimed matriarchs—that you’ll excuse the presumption.” — Details

From the Publisher

Javier Calvo claims to have channeled the ghost of Charles Dickens to write this postmodern thriller, and the young Spanish author tells his tale with enough brio— the cartoonish cast includes Pink Floyd-obsessed gansters and plastic-surgery-maimed matriarchs—that you’ll excuse the presumption.

Details

Javier Calvo’s Wonderful World is a unique, visionary novel: verbally magical, funny, and full of old-fashioned sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. This is the work of a marvelous literary talent.

Clive Barker

Surreal, sexy, wildly funny, self-indulgent, and wretchedly excessive . . . has all the earmarks of a cult favorite in the making.

Booklist (starred review)

"Surreal, sexy, wildly funny, self-indulgent, and wretchedly excessive . . . has all the earmarks of a cult favorite in the making."

Booklist

Calvo's first novel to appear in English is a frenetic and magnificent mashup of family drama, mob revenge story and surreal mystery featuring a gigantic enforcer obsessed with comic books, a 12-year-old girl fixated on Stephen King, a "namby-pamby" antiques dealer on a mad quest and a crime lord with a penchant for women's coats. Thirty years ago, Barcelona antiques dealer Lorenzo Girault was imprisoned for shady dealings. Now, his son, Lucas, insinuates himself into the seedy underworld to discover who was responsible for his father's ruin. While conspiring with Mr. Bocanegra, the crooked proprietor of a strip club, and Iris Gonzalvo, a failed actress, Lucas simultaneously combats his mother's efforts to usurp his share in the family business and watches after his disturbed young neighbor and only friend, Valentina Parini. Lucas's adventure is overlaid with a portentous "filial dream" and portions of a fictitious Stephen King novel that may hold clues to his father's fate, creating a rich and complex structure. The expansive cast can sometimes be difficult to sort out, but its quirks allow Calvo to set up a fast-moving narrative overflowing with hilarious situations. (Mar.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

Set in Barcelona, this crime page-turner features enigmatic antiques dealer Lucas Giraut, around whom spin two women: a teenage neighbor, the lonely and slightly unhinged Valentina Parini, and Lucas's mother, Fanny, with whom he has always had a stormy relationship. Lucas's obsession with discovering who betrayed his father leads him into the violent realm of organized crime; to call this world "wonderful" is, of course, ironic since it's only wonderful for the gangsters. The sprawling plot, centered on the attempted reproduction and sale of three forged Celtic panels, is advanced largely through the clumsy intervention of a plethora of unattractive characters, most of whom are defined by a single trait (e.g., one is a Rastafarian, another a Don Juan). The constant shifting of scenes pays homage to the cinema, and the narrative is threaded with numerous references to the mainstays of popular culture, especially the works of Stephen King; three of the four parts conclude with a chapter from King's apocryphal novel called, interestingly, Wonderful World. This is the first of Calvo's four works to be translated into English, capably done so by his wife. Despite its length, it is a fast-moving, entertaining read but has little staying power. For public libraries only.
—Lawrence Olszewski

Library Journal

Spanish author Calvo's second novel, the first to be published in English, is a sprawling tale of sex, drugs, art thieves and family rivalries in modern-day Barcelona. The heady mix of intellectual affairs and pop-culture absurdities, along with some questionable forays into metafiction, occasionally recalls David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996). The plot loosely hangs on the moody frame of Lucas Giraut, an antiques dealer who's in bed with Bocanegra, the seedy partner of his late father, to make a killing on some stolen Celtic paintings. He's also doing battle with his mother, who's making a play for the stock that Lucas owns in her husband's firm; questioning the motivations of Bocanegra, who had a shady relationship with Giraut's father and a Russian art thief; and managing an awkward relationship with his neighbor Valentina, a pubescent girl who has an unhealthy enthusiasm for Stephen King's upcoming opus-which, incidentally, is also titled Wonderful World. Calvo's novel includes excerpts from that book, in which a strangely perfect-seeming New World Order inevitably gives way to global panic, and that's just one of many cultural references he tinkers with, from car ads to pop music (Bob Marley and Pink Floyd most prominently) to porn to X-Men comics to couture. But to what end? Calvo hints at apocalyptic themes throughout, and stray plot threads help give the story an end-of-days feel. But this novel about chaos is disconcertingly chaotic itself. The array of forgers, mobsters, cops, gallery owners and lawyers that Calvo introduces has verve, color and the occasional bit of bawdy humor, but little coherence. Irritatingly, that may be the intent: As the climax nears, Calvo riffson the insincerity of plot and characterization. A chase scene, for instance, has "the atmosphere typical of the conclusion of a story." It's a tactic straight out of the postmodern playbook, but it's no less a cop-out for that. A baffling, disappointing epic from an intriguing stylist.

Kirkus Reviews