Connerland

Connerland | Literatura Random House, 2017


Laura Fernández has written an unhinged, hilarious novel about all those writers who never achieved fame but who managed to bring us to better places. A cross between Vonnegut’s mythical God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and some delirious, unpublished ramblings of a Thomas Pynchon who has seen Ghost one too many times.

The career of science-fiction writer Voss Van Conner takes off the day he electrocutes himself with a hairdryer. Wrapped in a towel with little dolphins on it, and with his hair a total mess, Voss opens his eyes in what appears to be the waiting room of a spaceship. Has he finally been abducted by aliens? Or is he really dead, and death consists of having a ghost representative who until now was a mere speed-dating-addicted flight attendant?

Either way, the author’s death is an excuse for a very important editor to turn him into GOLD, for his wife to admit she was about to leave him, and for his best friend to lose it. The rest is a fantastic voyage through the former life of the first sci-fi writer who could very well have an amusement park: a place where all the amusements would be the other worlds he created to escape the only one that really exists.

Uh-huh. That’s it. Welcome to Connerland.