Comemadre

National Book Award Nominee

“Somehow both genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page—a wickedly entertaining ride.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the Year

On the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, a doctor becomes involved in a misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, this novel asks, in pursuit of transcendence?

The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and discomfort: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and man-eating plants. Darkly funny, smart, and engrossing, here the monstrous is not alien, but the consequence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.

Reviews

“Outrageous…insanely funny.”—BOMB

“In this dark, dense, surprisingly short debut novel by the Argentinian author, we’re confronted with enough grotesqueries to fill a couple Terry Gilliam films and, more importantly, with the idea that the only real monsters are those that are formed out of our own ambition.”—The Millions