Bhaskar Thakuria's Reviews > Attila

Tombs of the earth, entombed earth
Sepulchers of the air, air without its rhythm
Air made earth, earth without its rhythm
Pits full of emptiness, not emptied of fullness
Door opening with no door, door with no opening
Opening that opens to the door, door that does not open to the opening
Window open to its closure, closed to its closure
Walled in walls, angleless corner
From walls the corners, walls without faces
Aerial whiteness, aqueous whiteness
Earthy whiteness, neither shining nor matte
That light absorbs, unspectrable white
That resists the prism, larva with no imago
Less than amorphous, barely abstract
Obstract material, aura between curds and whey
Between space and time, breathed without breath
Sweats without pores, and the more cubic
Less locatable, wells whose surfaces
Denude the numen, but not the monad
Fetus registered between wombs, surrounded by uteruses
Evergreen among wombs, full of uterine embryos
Feared by silence, feared by echo and shadow
Just a passable place, and only for the iron
Neither abortionist nor midwife, placental phallus
Sepultures of an idea, common and political
Extensible and estranging, singularly particle
Mausoleums occupied by hermit-like chaos
Garden urns, salted and pressed like angels
Crypts of the vitibund, impermeable to the soul
Pantheons of peasants, or penates of neon
In every era; how they coincide
Urban formations, and military ones
Where the olive tree drops its leaves on the roots
There the owl squints, looming under the while
Arched hypogeums, by the calcining belly
Swine dens, soldiers’ saints
From deboned battles, stretcher-bearers of poor light
Atropolis that hounds, without nature’s vomit
Nor nurture in return, he will not have what there was
Where he will not be what he had been, before tomorrow
And yesterday gone, but never today
Hollow skull expanded, compressed vertebral peak
Skin and flesh and offal, hiding in the marrow
Of the sarcophagal femurs, fortified refuges
In whose foreclosed fervor, souls are revived

- from Coll, Aliocha. Attila.

P.S.: In retrospect, I can only mention that this is the most opaque and indecipherable book I have ever read. The author was raised in Barcelona and then spent several years of his adult life in Paris as a translator of the works of Christopher Marlowe. And it was there that he committed suicide after finishing this, his last and most abstruse work of fiction. A writer with the firm belief that Joyce's Finnegans Wake was the 'starting point' for contemporary literature, and indeed that really shows off in the mode and technique of the narrative. The last few days of his life are depicted in the novel by Javier Serena Attila, which has been recently translated from the Spanish and published together with Coll's book in April 2025. In hindsight, I must say that I never read Wake, and although I am a fan of Joyce, I am yet to read that abstruse tome. That may indeed explain the kind of feeling I have after reading this one and my two-star rating. But, to say the truth, I came out of this in a bewildered state of mind- just because it is so incomprehensible and unclassifiable....