MUDD UP BOOK CLUBB: DE LA PAVA’S ‘A NAKED SINGULARITY’

[reposted from Jace’s Mudd Up]– Here at Dutty Artz, we talk a lot about Colombian culture and the immigrant experience, almost always from a musical perspective – yet there is all this amazing writing happening right now! The 2012 English-language translation of Santiago Gamboa’s Necropolis comes to mind, or closer to home, the phenomenal debut novel of New Jersey’s Sergio De La Pava, the April book clubb selection –

Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

This Sunday, April 28th, we’re meeting to discuss Sergio De La Pava’s wonderful, humane, laugh-out-loud funny, 689 page novel involving a public defender in New York City: A Naked Singularity (2008 ex libris, 2012 U Chicago Press). The opening chapter is a thing of wonder – try it and you’ll be hooked.

Book clubber Dan put me on to this; I recommend the thoughtful review from back when it was self-published. Dan writes:

“while the book is long, it’s never imposing. . . This is a book deeply concerned with the preterite: those who don’t have the resources to get themselves represented by others. It’s refreshing to find a recent New York novel that doesn’t bother to mention Williamsburg or Park Slope; the Upper East Side or Upper West Side might be mentioned in passing, but the Village, the East Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, the neighborhoods of New York that are seen in movies and literary fiction are absent from this book. There’s plenty left over; but we don’t usually read this. And this also stands out in that it’s a novel of work: Casi is a public defender, and spends most of his time at his job. The job isn’t lionized here: the protagonist is actively trying to be a good man, but he is decidedly not a hero by virtue of his work alone: the other occupants of his office are noticeably flawed, as he is. . .I’m also struck by how the book, comical as it often is, never has recourse to anything resembling magical realism.”

Also, boxing.

Sergio De La Pava

Sergio De La Pava
So! A Naked Singularity. Sunday. Book Clubb. Next up: sweet dumpling Thomas Bernhard. Stay muddy.

Here’s the Mudd Up Book Clubb reading list (you join by recommending a book, although we are somewhat full…) in reverse chronological order:

Rita Indiana Hernandez, Papi

Shelley Jackson, “A Report on Certain Curious Objects, Believed to Be Words in an Unknown Language of the Dead”

G. Willow Wilson, Alif, The Unseen

Michal Ajvaz, The Other City

Carmen Laforet, Nada

Patrik Ouředník, Europeana

Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber

Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum

Tatyana Tolystaya, The Slynx

Augusto Moterroso, Mister Taylor

Vladimir Sorokin, Ice Trilogy

Lauren Beukes, Zoo City

Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Juan Goytisolo, Exiled from Everywhere

Cesar Aira, How I Became a Nun

Maureen F. McHugh, Nekropolis