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At The Quarterly Conversation we’ve just published Scott Bryan Wilson’s review of A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava.
This is a bit atypical for a number of reasons. The book was originally published in 2008, and we generally don’t do reviews like this of books coming up on 3 years old. The book is also almost 700 pages, and it’s self-published.
So why did we decide to cover this book? Well, for one thing, one of my most trusted reviewers, a person who loves authors like Gaddis, Pynchon, Vollmann, McElroy, etc, says this is just as good. For another, I recalled a wildly favorable review a while back by Steve Donoghue, who’s about as tough and as well-read critic as I know.
So, putting those two together, either two people with very, very good taste and very, very high standards have both had an off-day, or this is one of the most underappreciated novels in recent years. I don’t know. I haven’t read it. But now I know I’m going to soon. Read the review and see if you want to decide for yourself.
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Wow … de la Pava mailed me a copy a year ago, and I kind of flipped through it but didn’t really take it seriously because 1) it was self-published, and 2) the author’s name made me suspect it was some kind of hoax (Spanish pava = turkey, colloquially “a bore”). Guess I didn’t look at it long enough. Hope I still have it around someplace…
Winter book club, anybody? Looks phenomenal.
Perhaps this is just what I need to keep me busy until Zone is finally published. Thanks Scott. Thanks again.
[...] Hermano Cerdo has interviewed Sergio de la Pava, well-known to readers of this site (for more see here and here) as the author of A Naked [...]