Nocilla Dream - Agustin Fernandez Mallo

Stretching between Carson City and the town of Ely in Nevada, Route 50 is 'the loneliest highway in North America.... a 260 mile stretch with a brothel at either end… only one thing on the entire route vaguely calls to mind the existence of humanity: hundreds of pairs of shoes have been hung from the only poplar that grows there, the only one that found water'. This isolated stretch of tarmac is an unlikely location to fix a collection of interlinked stories around, but this is what Agustin Fernandez Mallo does in Nocilla Dream.

The strands of narrative which run through Nocilla Dream are representative of the paradoxical interconnectedness and loneliness of modern life. Amongst the lives recorded by Mallo are those of Falconetti, an ex-boxer and soldier who has been inspired by a children’s book about Columbus to walk the length of Route 50; Ted, living with his family and 177 other souls in a micronation established 200 feet beneath the Nevada desert in a bunker which formerly served as the Government Radioactive Waste Management Centre; Che Guevara, who has faked his own death, and now finds himself travelling to Vietnam with his wife and buying fake Raybans, at the age of 78; Kenny, who has taken up permanent residence in Singapore International Airport; and a Scandinavian slaughterhouse worker. All of these stories appear to exist in isolation, and yet all are linked in some way to the poplar tree hung with trainers by the roadside of Route 50.

Running parallel to Mallo’s fiction is a series of quotations from the likes of Richard Feynman and Jorge Luis Borges, illustrating the progression of scientific knowledge in the twentieth century, and also its alienating effect on individuals. While the stories within Nocilla Dream are all connected, it is rare for the characters to encounter one another in space and time. What they see instead are the traces of those who have come before them, like imprints in the sand. They may attempt to interpret these signs, but rarely succeed.

Like Hunter S Thompson, Mallo searches for the American Dream in the Nevada Desert. He is interested in the lure of capital which brings people from all over the continent to live on the outskirts of Vegas. Predictably, behind the glitzy exterior of the casinos, life is hard: 'every day poses new challenges to the vow that all these people made when they arrived here: that they would prosper in Las Vegas'. As the objectives of wealth and property remain out of reach, they turn to new stimuli: 'the percentage of adolescents involved in crime, drug addiction and sex had risen to 30.75 per cent in the past three years'. These ad hoc communities of dispossessed individuals are mirrored in the micronations which Mallo references throughout the novel. Nocilla Dreams suggests that traditional methods of organisation, such as cities and states, are outdated in a globalised society; individuals are free to form their own amorphous communities, which can expand and contract as necessary.

Mallo’s interlinked stories are reminiscent of Joanna Walsh’s collection Fractals, although these feel like more of a consciously intellectual exercise. As with Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, also published by Fitzcarraldo, Nocilla Dream stretches the form of the ‘novel’, blending short stories, extended quotations and non-fiction into a coherent whole. Nocilla Dream is a philosophical road trip which questions the meaning of community in the Twenty-First century.