Tears of the Trufflepig
A Novel
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE. One of Tor.com's Best Books of 2019.
"Readers of this breakout work [will leave] thrilled and disoriented in equal measure." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
One of The Daily Beast's Best Summer Beach Reads of 2019, one of Lit Hub and The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2019, one of Buzzfeed and Tor.com's Books to Read This Spring, and one of the Chicago Review of Books' Best New Books of May
A parallel universe. South Texas. A third border wall might be erected between the United States and Mexico, narcotics are legal and there’s a new contraband on the market: filtered animals—species of animals brought back from extinction to amuse the very wealthy.
Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life gets complicated after a swashbuckling journalist invites him to an underground dinner at which filtered animals are served. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous and surreal journey, in the course of which he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers.
Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores’s Tears of the Trufflepig is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, and an introduction to a staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A near-future picaresque of genetic manipulation, indigenous legend, and organized crime on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Flores's delirious debut never quite delivers on its imaginative premise. Bellacosa, a freelance South Texas construction equipment locator, gets drafted by journalist Paco Herbert to attend an "underground dinner" where wealthy invitees eat extinct animals that have been recreated through the process of "filtering." Among the living amusements is a Trufflepig, a "piglike reptile" central to the mythology of the (fictional) Arana a tribe. Once home, Bellacosa is greeted by his brother, who has just escaped a Mexican syndicate attempting to shrink his head and sell it as an Arana a artifact. Bellacosa himself is soon kidnapped by a crooked border patrolman and, in the sequence leading to the story's conclusion, hooked with electrodes to a Trufflepig that transforms his psyche into "the memory of all living things." Flores's novel is jam-packed with excitement, but his inability to prioritize his ideas prevents them from cohering into a credible vision of dystopia. Despite this, Flores's novel shows he has talent and creativity to spare.
