Agustín Fernández Mallo's magnum opus is a monstrous book that reaches out and touches everything—love and sentimentalism, war, our pitiful human intelligence, moon landings, physics and dead stars, car chases, Facebook, rooftop tomato gardens—yet is somehow still accessible in Thomas Bunstead's elegant translation. You can't walk away from this novel without feeling brutally changed. There are one-liners that will digest you whole. After 600 pages, you'll realize you've been standing next to a mountain. For readers of W.G. Sebald and Daša Drndić.
