‘[A] fascinating experimental [novel which evokes] the ways the past is layered upon the present by a narrative technique of juxtaposition and adumbration—by adjoining or stacking together starkly different stories. The Things We’ve Seen is preoccupied with the sensation of multiplicity ... Echoes connect the stories’ portrayals of isolation and unexpected collisions, but nothing is straightforward. Mr. Mallo has said that he was inspired by David Lynch and Salvador Dalí, and there is undoubtedly a surreal, unconscious quality to the motifs that defies interpretation... a unique work that captures an uncanny aspect of the lonely but bewilderingly overpopulated contemporary experience.’
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
‘These past 15 years Agustín Fernández Mallo has evolved a method in which, owing something to Borges and perhaps early Nicholson Baker, troubled narrators’ outlandish events draw seamlessly upon everything around them; on the page, advertising hoardings, the screen or mind, these fragments are shored against their ruins, catching our world in its present flux.As these pages knit together, conspiracy theory meets the recondite (mud’s multiple benefits being ‘both a proven contraceptive and, when ingested in high quantities, capable of engendering mystical experiences’). These pages have a similar spirit to Flaubert’s Parrot, The Debt to Pleasure and The Anatomy of Melancholy — a challenge well met by the translator, Thomas Bunstead.’
— Christopher Hawtree, Spectator
‘Mallo delivers another work of postmodern, Dalí-esque surrealism with this mind-bending novel...Throughout, Mallo’s prose is enticing—at times conversational, exhilarating, hilarious, and deeply quirky. If a through line emerges, it’s in the ideas, which revolve around the trash heap of postwar wreckage and consumption (the writer calls New York a “temple of detritus”). Out of this trash, Mallo has crafted a remarkable work.’
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘Fernández Mallo, the de facto leading light of an avant-garde literary movement known in Spain as the Nocilla Generation (so-called for the author’s own Nocilla Trilogy, 2015–19), writes here in a manner that variously recalls, references, evokes and invokes the writings, aesthetics and thinking of W. G. Sebald, Carl Hiaasen, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Georges Perec, Octavio Paz, Ben Lerner, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jorge Luis Borges, Edward Hopper, Giorgio De Chirico and many others, and yet that remains entirely his own in its final assembly and presentation.’
— David Terrien, ArtReview
‘But there are no limits to the conjecture a person can engage in, no matter what their daily reality. Already, in Book I, Mallo has demonstrated a wildly discursive, apparently disconnected form of narrative (including retelling a story by Jeffrey Eugenides) which continues here, culminating in a series of messages from the former astronaut’s deceased mother found in the vomit of George Bush snr. Yes! Mallo’s imagination never falters. To stay with him means loosening all limitations we might wish to impose on a text. The reward is an audacious adventure ... This is, indeed, a dream of a book.’
— Declan O'Driscoll, Irish Times
‘Echoes, implosions and coincidences soon make us feel we are circulating in a single space-time of displacements and substitutions. Shapes, for example, repeat in different scales or contexts: the reservoir in Central Park has the outline of Iberia. The most bravura example of this form of paranoia – signs everywhere – is given to a Dalí avatar who establishes a connection between the Twin Towers, the twin girls in the corridor of The Shining, the two columns of the pause icon on a screen, and (the narrator’s later input) a line in one of Lorca’s New York poems. It stays with you.’
Lorna Scott Fox, New Left Review
‘There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you’ll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolaño another. Agustín Fernández Mallo has become one, too. This novel, which ranges across the world and beyond it, is hugely ambitious in scope. It’s a weird, recursive, paranoiac, funny, menacing and thrilling book.’
— Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man
‘Charmingly voracious and guided by fanatical precision and wit, Mallo ties the loose threads of the world together into intricate, charismatic knots. This is the expansive, omnivorous sort of novel that threatens to show you every thought you’ve ever had in a new and effervescent light, along with so many others you couldn’t have dreamed.’
— Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations
‘Some great works create worlds from which to look back at ourselves and recalibrate; The Things We’ve Seen takes the world as it is and plays it back through renewed laws of physics. Rarely has a novel left me with such new eyes, an X-ray view of the present.’
— DBC Pierre, author of Meanwhile in Dopamine City
‘The most original and powerful author of his generation in Spain.’
— Mathias Enard, author of Compass
‘The Things We’ve Seen confirms Fernández Mallo as one of the best writers in Spanish, with an absolutely unique style and fictional world.’
— Jorge Carrión, New York Times in Spanish
