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"Providence" by Juan Francisco Ferré

Read and understood the above one would expect now a glowing review of the novel but this is not going to be exactly. "Providence" is a book a bit daunting, 587 pages and there are many pages to be very good writer to get someone to have a full-sized effort. Ferré is a good writer, but still not so good. I personally find that is the main handicap of the novel: its excess. A good pruning that had allowed in 300 pages would have been Pearl to avoid glut, personally, I felt in the last 100.
Why, moreover, "Providence" is written in first person and the book, in a sense, is a long monologue by the main protagonist, a novel English film director embarked on his new film project while teaching a course in Brown University located in the U.S. city of Providence.
And the use of this technique is simultaneously a great success and a tremendous defect. The voice of this character is pervasive and, given the second extract I have offered, it is clear that voice is a powerful, funny, original, but at the long, somewhat tiresome. Remember
protagonists somewhat Heinleniano this was the wise old hermit, knew everything and explained everything, never confused. Or, to quote an author's most fashionable, has reminded me of Houellebecq's protagonists (especially to "The Possibility of an Island"), cults but unbearable, conceited, self-sufficient coolest eight but, ultimately, exasperating. All know, all statements (for who do not speak) and the world comes down to idiots who are against them and intelligent women who sleep with them, support them and then, inevitably, betray them. This, for a couple of hundred pages is his grace, in five hundred can end up causing a nervous breakdown. Why
addition, Providence has a patchy structure. The bulk of the novel focuses on the description of college life of our protagonist in Brown (by the way, where he teaches Ferré himself). But the classes themselves and the relationships between teachers end up staying in the background, most of the story is to see how many women lie with our teacher and theater director, teachers, students and passers-by, told with a wealth of details and, inevitably, going into the routine and boredom. Misunderstand as anyone else enjoy the description of a good powder in a novel but when that is just becoming apparent, the only purpose of the book, I just bored. The repetition makes me bored.
So is "Providence" a bad book? Well not exactly, rather the opposite. Ferré writes well, and many of the adventures and opinions of the protagonist of the book are fun, exciting and very interesting. Sometimes you can not peel your eyes from the pages, pieces like the journey through the secret passageways beneath the tomb of Lovercraft, or mania developed into the movie "Jaws" Spielberg are fascinating. The trouble is that, again, Ferré is carried away by the exuberance and do not know the verbiage curb his alter ego, which makes the end, many of the thoughts and adventures end up being a bit repetitive, indistinguishable from others that occurred 50 pages. A shame, What a great book could be! Paragraph
What fantastic? Why this is a blog about fantasy literature. Well ... it depends. Without being an expert in literature, I have the feeling that this novel plays in the league of the postmodern, in an attempt to introduce the world as a set of layers with multiple readings. And in that sense, "Providence" fulfills this premise that what you tell us can be understood in many ways. It is possible that what happens is real, and you may not. It is possible that everything is a game, or that we are facing the largest global conspiracies, or in the near future where some things today are no longer impossible. Or maybe none of the above is correct. From the standpoint of science fiction there varis strokes, and note that Ferré is a good deal of gender readings (Lovercraft and Dick were the most obvious), there is a cyborg, there could be a crazy game that the wearer also a peculiar Revelation, and a no less peculiar immortal, and even a transfer to an AI personality. But, I fear, the fiercest fans will not feel this novel as yours. All these details together represent only a handful of pages in a project as huge as this book. The bulk no longer a quite realistic description of life in the U.S. very paranoid today. In other cases
now I would paternalistic (one of my many flaws) and throw shit about the short-sightedness of the fandom that never read books like this. It's their loss, would sentence. But in this case, I do not know really who does not read "Providence" will have lost something. There is a snack fit for all tastes, and includes the finest readers, I almost choked me though, I recognize that sometimes the journey is worth it. Too bad not a little shorter and less arduous.

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"Providence", Other

might think, given the previous statement, that "Providence" only makes winks to fans of science fiction. Nothing is further from reality, its author, in general, pays homage to all that, currently, is known as geek (although I prefer the original term Ferré English freaks) and, incidentally, reflects sharply on the characteristics of this group of fans of certain aspects of popular culture. Valga this statement as also shows the style that permeates the novel:

could become the overnight (...) in a cult movie, at least in the guild of freaks, the dark fraction of the population traumatized by many complex since childhood (poverty, marginalization, ugliness, lack of opportunities, low educational level and professional of the household, poverty secular public school, dorm rooms, shared loneliness, adolescence, neighborhood, etc.). These traumas are translated into adulthood a communicable code that allows them to finally come out of poor living conveying a vision of reality (which would better respond to the expectations then forged a sentimental education in failure absolute and mental horizon of life and overhead time Masturbation as personality (...). All these poets of the inferiority, marginalization and immaturity as an attitude and lifestyle often fill their senseless sermons in favor of cultural alteralidad a lot of publications which more bizarre, fanzines and magazines that serve as official bulletins of the underworld, parish leaves taken from a madhouse evicted by conventional psychiatry and care given to terminally ill patients, detailed reports of the English subculture that is taking over for good, aesthetics and creating innovative and even more insistent speeches in the mainstream media. (pages 122-123).

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An Excerpt From "Providence" by Juan Francisco Ferré

"Providence" will probably be one of the books of the year. Herralde Prize finalist, backed by Goytisolo, published in the highly prestigious Anagram and, in general, receiving good reviews.
may also be possible that the regular reader of CF was attracted to him, since in the novel we can read excerpts as juicy as this, a conversation between the protagonist and an iconoclast of his students at Brown University who suffers a known English writer (his name is never quoted but is known as the author autonomic subsidized) with a very clear ideas about what is literature:

To make matters worse I tried to talk uselessly Dick, Philip K. Dick, you know, the writer who best described the twentieth-century American life and, of course, the century, and goes and tells me to humiliate me in front of other students, who hates science fiction, which is a subgenus subnormal and adolescents ", which is not serious literature and, of course, he only read serious literature ... (pages 432-433).