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.)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
