Eduardo Mendoza - A shape-shifting extraterrestrial has disappeared in Barcelona, having assumed the form of Madonna

Eduardo Mendoza, No Word From Gurb, Trans. By Nick Caistor, Telegram Books, 2007.


"A shape-shifting extraterrestrial named Gurb has disappeared in Barcelona, having assumed the form of Madonna, whose image he glimpses on a street poster. His partner, desperate to get him back, goes about trying to find him in a more discreet guise, scrupulously writing his observations in a diary... No stone is left unturned, no danger too much, in the search for his old pal Gurb in the topsy-turvy world of planet Earth. "No Word From Gurb" is a riotous satire highlighting the contradictions of Western society in a lively, intelligent and sweetly ironic way." "No Word from Gurb (original in Spanish Sin noticias de Gurb) was written by Spanish writer Eduardo Mendoza and published as a novel in 1990. However, it originally appeared in the Spanish national newspaper El País in regular installments. The story is about an alien who is lost in Barcelona whilst in search of his friend Gurb. Through taking on the appearances of various people, including the famous Spanish singer Marta Sánchez, he explores the city observing human life.
The book is in the style of a diary, so the reader is taken day by day along the same journey with the alien, as he discovers more and more about the human race. The story begins with the narrator talking about his ideas and aims of travelling to Earth and adapting to the lifestyle there. Through writing this book, Mendoza captures an image of Barcelona as it is preparing for the Olympics in 1992. The atmospehere at that time, along with the chaos and absurdities of modern human life, are among the subjects that are focused on in this satirical novel. As a parody, ´No Word from Gurb´ depicts the day to day life of the city from the perspective of an alien. The author focuses in particular on portraying the urban lifestyle of humans; using Barcelona as a great example of a big city. Parody is a feature that is present throughout the book, an example of which is when the alien describes the composition of water as ´hydrogen, oxygen and poo´.
Throughout his search for his friend Gurb, the alien criticises the behaviour of human beings and realises that there are many differences between his culture and that of humans. For example, although he doesn't understand why, he notes that there are class divisions on Earth: there are rich and poor areas of Barcelona, like San Cosme and Pedralbes. Furthermore, he criticises the chaos regarding the upcoming Olympic Games at the time. In reality, there was a lot of public criticism due to the reported lack of organisation when planning and preparing for the international event. Mendoza again describes the disorganisation of the city as a parody." - Wikipedia

"No Word From Gurb is narrated by an alien, part of a two-man crew that land on earth on an exploratory mission. The other member of the crew - lower-ranking, but responsible for most of the tasks on board, making the narrator somewhat dependent on him - is Gurb. After taking on human form - which they can do, with some effort - Gurb hitches a ride and disappears, thereafter making practically no effort to report back to his nominal commander. Hence the narrator's refrain: "No word from Gurb", which proves to be the case for most of the novel. The next day the narrator goes in search of Gurb, but he proves neither as adaptable nor as adept as Gurb; losing his head (literally) is only one of his problems.... The narrator has extraterrestrial powers, which allow him to change appearance (though not always to hold that appearance) and he takes on some unusual guises. He also manages to manipulate electronics, allowing him, for example, to set up a bank account with more funds than he could ever need. Still, he's pretty slow on the uptake regarding many terrestrial things, and causes numerous minor and major messes. Mendoza maintains his incomprehension nicely through the text, treating the commonplace and the completely extraordinary all the same, to good comic effect.
They're in Barcelona, which is caught up in the Olympic build-up (for 1992), and part of the fun Mendoza has is in skewering the rampant speculation and mismanagement of the times. The narrator takes everything as given: whatever the situation is, he assumes that's what's normal -- which is amusing for the reader, given how much is, in fact, so out of kilter. With his enormous appetite, his attempts to help out (which usually lead to some sort of disaster), and his largely futile searches for love and Gurb, the narrator is an endearing, hapless character - truly alien, but one that still puts on pyjamas when he goes to bed. Mendoza is very good on the details, though it's hardly a logically coherent set-up. Parts are very, very funny. Still, Mendoza struggles to fit it together into a real story, and it drifts away from him after a while. Letting Gurb play a more prominent role again doesn't help matters, either, and while the story is tied together in the end it feels - especially in comparison to the sparkling bits from earlier - somewhat uninspired. Still, there's lots of good fun to be had here, and the novel offers quite a few laughs." - The Complete Review

"There's a thin line between sense and drivel. Money. Organised religion. Sport. The irrationality and marvel of human affairs is rarely demonstrated better than when seen through the eyes of an outsider. And what better outsider than an extraterrestrial? It's a literary device that can be used and abused of course; the zenith being the Martian school of poetry, particularly Craig Raine's classic A Martian Sends A Postcard Home. Enter Catalan writer Eduardo Mendoza, one of Spain's leading literary lights, turning his hand to the medium with No Word From Gurb. Two shape-shifting aliens (the Captain and his friend Gurb) land on Earth and camouflage their spaceship as a family apartment. Gurb adopts the "appearance of human being known as Madonna" and is instantly picked up by a passing admirer. The narrator assumes the image of "his lordship the Duke of Olivares" and sets out to find his missing compadre, encountering arrests, crushes, fights and various incarnations as popes, cowboys and actors along the way. What follows is an enjoyable absurdist knockabout, which coasts along on its considerable charm and sweetness. Materialising in the middle of a busy intersection, the confused narrator is repeatedly run over by cars, at another time he forgets to breathe: "my face turned bright purple; my eyes came out on stalks, and I again had to go and recover them from under the wheels of passing cars." There's no doubting the ingenuity in conceits such as reading the future in a hen's egg, finding frozen bodies in the air-conditioning vents, the alternative history of a black empire where white people were slaves or the original Babylon ("not the one that appears in chronicles…but another, earlier one, situated near where modern-day Zurich is to be found"). Mendoza is a fount of observational wisdom; describing the folly of small talk ("we compare prices today to those in days gone by"), the sight of cars attacking each other, "old folks drying in the sun" and the ludicrous distinction between rich and poor with wit and relish. For all his use of stylistic games, his clowning repetitions and riffs off the diary format, his humour seems as natural, surreal and sharp as a child's; on the absurdities of human biology he notes "almost all have two eyes which, depending on how one looks at their heads, are placed either at the front or at the back."
Gifted with a zippy, colloquial-rich translation, his prose gains vigour in several fine set-pieces (the narrator's first visit to a public house springs to mind), proudly surveying his native city of Barcelona (with winks to locals like Dali i.e. the telephone as "a lobster with legs") and the quirks of its inhabitants. Amidst the fun and games though there are snags. While grounded in Catalan life, sometimes it feels too parochial especially with the persistent complaints about the city council. As with most picaresque tales, the book lacks a solid direction or progression, fluttering from unrelated scene to scene with tenuous links between. The kind of whimsy present in No Word… coupled with the staccato diary set-up can cause fatigue over the length of a novel but Mendoza has a charisma that by and large avoids irritation. Whether the book has the darkness, emotional engagement or bite to make a lasting impression is arguable, but it's entertaining, peppered with insight and good-spirits, and hell that ain't no crime." - Darran Anderson

"If aliens were to read Eduardo Mendoza’s No Word From Gurb they may well determine that it suffers from ’structural simplicity’. While this is true, it makes it no different from most other things on Earth they are likely to discover, like family apartments and Ford Fiestas. The novel, initially published in installments in the popular Spanish newspaper, El País, is told in the style of a diary and parodies the city of Barcelona in the build up to the 1992 Olympics. Each day sees a number of entries, usually little more than paragraph with a time of the day attached, as one of the two aliens in the novel writes down his observations about human life while searching for his companion, the eponymous Gurb. Gurb, having been given the task of making contact with humans, has vanished. It’s probably something to do with how he looks:
Given that we are travelling in non-corporeal form (pure intelligence-analytical factor 4800) decide he should take on bodily appearance similar to that of local inhabitants. Reason: so as not to attract the attention of the autochthonous fauna (real and potential). Consult the Astral Earth Catalogue of Assimilable Forms (AECAF) and choose to give Gurb the appearance of human being known as Madonna.
While not attracting attention is the name of the game for these aliens, the narrator can’t help but attract it as he settles into the task of finding Gurb. He regularly takes human form to blend in although the forms he chooses (Gary Cooper, the Duke of Olivares, and His Holiness Pope Pius XII, amongst others) are never as inconspicuous as he thinks. His ignorance of human customs also draws strange looks, like when a woman, mistaking him for a down-and-out, gives him some spare change and he, out of politeness, swallows it. Or, when ordering in a restaurant: “The gentleman asks what I will have to drink. Not wishing to attract attention, I order the most common human liquid: urine.” There’s a great deal of humour to be had with the idea of aliens trying to understand human culture and Mendoza plays it for laughs throughout, like when the narrator reads a mystery novel by a famous English lady:
The plot of her novel is very simple. An individual who, to simplify, we will call A, is found dead in the library. Another individual, B, tries to discover who killed A and why. Following a series of illogical undertakings (all that was needed was the formula 3(x2-r)n-+0 and the case would have been solved from the start), B states (wrongly) that the murderer is C. Everyone seems happy with this conclusion, including C. No idea what a butler is.
Repetition is another key to Mendoza’s humour, showcased a number of times when the narrator performs the same activity over and over, with small variations, like when he decides to scour the city looking for Gurb:
15.00 Decide to make a systematic search of the city instead of remaining in one spot. […] Set off following the ideal heliographic plan I built into my internal circuits on leaving the ship. Fall into a trench dug by the Catalan Gas Company. 15.02 Fall into a trench dug by the Catalan Hydroelectric Company. 15.03 Fall into a trench dug by the Barcelona Water Company. 15.04 Fall into a trench dug by the Calle Corcega Neighbourhood Association. 15.06 Decide to abandon the ideal heliographic plan and to walk watching where I put my feet. While it may seem parochial, poking fun at the state of Barcelona as it (lazily) worked toward the Olympics, there’s an element of truth that can transcend any city, be it criticisms of traffic control, social problems like drugs, the constant cycle of repairs that seem to keep museums closed, or the anti-social mores of councils: Woken by a thunderous crash. Millions (or more) years ago, the Earth was created out of a series of terrible cataclysms: the roaring oceans covered the coastline and buried whole islands, whilst gigantic mountain ranges collapsed and erupting volcanoes threw up new ones; eaethquakes shifted entire continents. To commemorate these events, every night City Hall sends machines, called refuse trucks, to reproduce that planetary chaos under its inhabitants’ windows.
The steady stream of misunderstandings as the alien goes about finding Gurb, making connections with humans, and even considering romance is nicely balanced against the impressions of humanity from an external point of view as he discovers concepts that don’t exist on his own world, such as class:
Amongst other categories, human beings are apparently divided into rich and poor. This is a division to which they attach huge importance, without knowing why. The fundamental difference between rich and poor seems to be this: the rich, wherever they go, do not pay, even though they acquire and consume as much as they like. The poor, on the other hand, pay through the nose.
Although the daily narrative takes us on a whistlestop tour of Barcelona, the biggest problem Mendoza has is coming to the end of the line. It’s inevitable that Gurb is found, although the way that comes to pass is a tad clumsy and fortuitous. Perhaps the formula 3(x2-r)n-+0 doesn’t work for some books, but the fun to be had with No Word From Gurb is not so much in its conclusion as it is its journey." - BookLit Eduardo Mendoza, The Olive Labyrinth, Trans. by Nick Caistor, Telegram, 2010.


"Our hero, Gonewiththewind, has once again been released by the police from a lunatic asylum in Barcelona. This time his mission is to recover a briefcase filled with money lost under very peculiar circumstances. Mysteries and mishaps follow each other at breakneck speed, as the hapless detective delves beyond humor and the absurd to the frontiers of the truly surreal." Eduardo Mendoza, The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt, Trans. By Nick Caistor, Telegram Books, 2008.


"Released from an asylum to help with a police enquiry, the quick-witted and foul-smelling narrator delves deep into the underworld of 1970s Barcelona to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a teenage girl from a convent school. Aided only by his ageing prostitute sister and the voluptuous nymphomaniac, Mercedes, the narrator's investigations take him deeper into a mystery involving murdered sailors, suicidal daughters, a web of organised crime and a secret, underground crypt. It is a hilarious detective romp through seedy underworld Barcelona." Eduardo Mendoza, A Light Comedy (Panther), Random House, 2003.


“Polished if not precisely ‘light’ comedy from an accomplished literary novelist who knows how to entertain.” - Kirkus Reviews

"With its multiple identities, triple twists and pleasing ambiguities, the plot is dexterously constructed, satisfyingly rounded and always busy?an ironical portrait of an entire society.? - TLS Eduardo Mendoza, The City of Marvels, Trans. by Bernard Molloy, Simon & Schuster, 1990.


"In the late 19th century, Onofre Bouvila ventures from his parents' farm to work in Barcelona. By 1929, he is a arms smuggler who cannot forget his first love. "Unfortunately, the characterization remains opaque, though the novel entertains and informs with its panorama of Catalan politics and social life,'' stated PW." - Publishers Weekly

Eduardo Mendoza, The Truth About the Savolta Case, Trans. by Alfred Mac Adam, Pantheon, 1992.

"Rich, evocative narration, a colorful, turbulent setting, and a graceful, literate translation animate this captivating tale of Barcelona in the wake of WW I. Amid clashing anarchists, Catalonian separatists, unionists, police, quasi-feudal industrialists and common hoodlums, antihero Javier Miranda ekes out a living as a lawyer's assistant. Naive, fatalistic Miranda's duties introduce him to two very different men who become his closest friends: Pajarito de Soto, an idealistic journalist, and Paul-Andre Lepprince, a wealthy and mysterious young Frenchman who is a partner in the local Savolta weapons factory. When both de Soto and Savolta are murdered, Miranda finds himself at the center of a convoluted and increasingly violent conflict he will not fully understand for years to come. Newspaper accounts, court documents, letters, omniscient narration and Miranda's first-person reminiscences maneuver the reader back and forth in time. Mendoza's elegant, original novel draws on such genres as police procedural, mystery and romance - even the novel of manners--to dramatize moral and political insights." - Publishers Weekly

"Set against the labor strikes and Syndicalist uprisings in the years during and following World War I, this whodunit involves the upper echelons of a moribund business complex. Mendoza skillfully unravels his tale like a stylistic mosaic, weaving disjunct dialogs and simulated newspaper articles and court testimony, the full impact of which is not revealed until the last chapter. Despite shallow characterizations, the denouement may catch even attentive readers by surprise as major suspects are bumped off one by one. This keen translation of the 1975 novel complements A City of Miracles ( LJ 11/1/88) in yet another historic fictionalization of Barcelona." - Lawrence Olszewski Eduardo Mendoza, The Year of the Flood, Trans. by Nick Caistor, Harvill Press, 1996.

"A fresh young nun, Consuelo is appointed Mother Superior to a convent in 1950s Catalonia. Sister Consuelo finds that she must plead with Augusto, the local landowner, for support to convert a hospital run by the nuns to a home for the elderly. Through a whole season of heavy rains she revisits Augusto and yields to a passionate love affair. Torn by inner conflict, she resolves to end the affair; but there is an unexpected twist. Nick Caistor has translated a fevered, atmospheric, and sensational tale." - Amazon.com Review

"Though his prose is nearly stilted by old-world formality (maybe it's the translation), Mendoza (The Truth About the Savolta Case) spins a compelling tale of money, faith and love. In the 1950s, with memories of the Spanish Civil War still raw, a determined mother superior named Sister Consuelo, trying to raise funds to convert a nunnery's medical clinic into an old-age home, approaches a rich land-owner in the Catalonian countryside. This innocent overture leads to untold complications for Sister Consuelo, who finds that her attraction for the wealthy Don Augusto is entirely worldly and utterly undeniable. As Don Augusto becomes more caught up in the finances of the plan, Sister Consuelo gets more intimate with the details of his life-his romantic past, his support for Franco in the Civil War and his fear of mountain bandits. Their burgeoning affair is complicated by the torrential flooding that afflicts the region and closes the nunnery's operating room, as well as by the wounded leader of the bandits, who kidnaps Sister Consuelo and tells her a thing or two about Don Augusto's ungentlemanly nature. The plot is straight out of a dime-store novelette, but Mendoza relates it with moral intelligence and emotional resonance, investing his characters with ample, adult ambiguities. When, many years later, Sister Consuelo reminisces about the doomed affair, it is difficult to say whether she or Don Augusto was spurned." - Publishers Weekly