Roque Larraquy - Comemadre creates a full circle of the grotesqueries humans inflict upon one another in pursuit of immortality. Grotesque, outrageous, and insanely funny... has almost no equal in literature

Roque Larraquy, Comemadre, Trans. by Heather Cleary, Coffee House Press, 2018.




In the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, a doctor becomes involved in a misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and discomfort: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and man-eating plants. Darkly funny, smart, and engrossing, here the monstrous is not alien, but the consquence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.




“I love Comemadre. But here I am, days after reading, still asking myself what kind of book it is. Is it humor? Horror? Is it about art? Science? Philosophy? One thing is certain: it is just the kind of book that you’ll want to recommend to your friends over and over again, and here I am, still doing it!” —Samanta Schweblin


“Moving from a sanatorium at the beginning of the twentieth century in which the doctors decide to use their patients as fodder for a deadly experiment, to an artist at the beginning of the twenty-first who pushes the fleshy manipulations of Chris Burden and Damien Hirst to a new extreme, Comemadre is a raucous and irreverent philosophical meditation on the relationship of the body to science and to art. Walking a line between parody and critique, this is a grotesquely funny and powerful book.” —Brian Evenson


“Comemadre is one of the wildest and most disturbing novels I’ve read. With a language that dissects the world while describing it, Roque Larraquy constructs a dark fable about the annihilation of the body, about perversions of art and science. Heather Cleary’s magnificent translation does justice to this extravagant gem—composed like a Hieronymus Bosch diptych that sets us before the monsters of unleashed reason.” —Daniel Saldaña París


“Who the devil is this Roque Larraquy? His first book seems like an artifact written with four hands—amid laughter and hidden from everyone—by Jorge Luis Borges and Witold Gombrowicz. Or maybe not Gombrowicz, but Virgilio Piñera. Or maybe not Borges, but Villiers de L’Isle-Adam adapted by Paul Valéry (did you know Valéry spent his youth digging up skulls to make calculations?). What is certain is that this truly magnificent novel exudes intelligence, humor, cynicism, cruelty. Cold passion with unsettling—and unexpectedly moving—effects.” —Ignacio Echevarría



“Larraquy spent seven years writing his first book . . . and another three passed before the appearance of his second. We don’t know how long it will take him to publish his next one, but we intuit that there will be a third and a fourth, because in what we’ve seen of his work up to now there is a discernible literary project—a project that’s difficult to define, for which terms like ‘story,’ ‘novel,’ or ‘poetry’ are insufficient.” —Maximiliano Tomas



“In spite of having all the necessary ingredients for a historical novel (the clinic, sordid and suburban; the positivist, anthropometric delusions), it’s not a historical novel; in spite of possessing, at first glance, the traits that generally mark ‘realistic fiction,’ (the cross between conceptual art, spectacle, and biopolitics; the gray areas of death, sickness and animalism as thresholds of humanity), something in its tone subjects the reality to a process of distancing treating it as a foreign body—alien—neither completely alive nor completely dead.” —Diego Peller






Larraquy’s delightfully terrifying debut tells of a twisted medical experiment and a shocking art installation a century apart. In 1907 at the Temperly Sanatorium, a few miles outside Buenos Aires, Doctor Quintana’s superiors propose a disquieting experiment in the name of science: decapitate patients without damaging their vocal cords and, in the few seconds while the severed head maintains life, ask it what it sees. Quintana, who believes “to be present, but not participate directly, is the dream of every doctor,” passively goes along with conducting the experiment; he’s more interested in the sanatorium’s head nurse, Menéndez, who rebuffs his increasingly forceful advances. One decapitated head says “I’d like some water”; another “screams for nine seconds straight.” The experiment soon gets out of hand, culminating in a violent, thoroughly unsettling event. Afterward, the novel switches and is narrated by an unnamed Argentinian artist in 2009 whose displays include a live baby with two heads. He meets Lucio Lavat, another artist who looks just like him, and the two conceive a gruesome installation. How Larraquy ties the two halves of the novel together is surprising and brilliant. Throughout, there is a focus on bodies: a patient believes “each word [she] utters is a fly leaving her mouth”; at one point, the artist thinks, “people with long fingers touch things as if they were leaving a trail of slime on them”; and the book’s title refers to a plant that produces flesh-eating larvae. Shuttling between B-movie horror and exceedingly dark comedy, the novel is somehow both genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page—a wickedly entertaining ride. - Publishers Weekly





“The prose is distilled but rich—like dark chocolate.” —Chicago Tribune“Comemadre creates a full circle of the grotesqueries humans inflict upon one another in pursuit of immortality. . . . Read Larraquy to experience a strange waking dream from which there is no escape.” —Arkansas International
“. . . [I]t’s a brief novel, but its impact is massive.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn


“In this dark, dense, surprisingly short debut novel by the Argentinian author, we’re confronted with enough grotesqueries to fill a couple Terry Gilliam films and, more importantly, with the idea that the only real monsters are those that are formed out of our own ambition.” —The Millions

“. . . a deeply unnerving and morbidly fascinating novel . . .” —Booklist

“Larraquy ventures into the gothic here, only to push beyond it into an even more disquieting realm of obsession, transformation, and the monstrous unknown.” —Words without Borders

“Funny, grotesque and smart.” —Brazo’s Bookstore

“Like a beloved B movie, this is the campy horror show all my fellow sickos have been waiting for.”—Keaton Patterson


“Larraquy has written a perfect novel: spare, urgent, funny, original, and infused with wonderfully subtle grace. I neglected my domestic duties to devour it.” —Elisa Albert


“Comemadre is a sensory experience: images repeat, ‘confession’ has a smell, and obsession feels palpable. The two narrative threads within this wildly strange and perversely humorous novel map the expansive life of the mind, the drive to make a mark on history, and the impact of transgressions in art and science. If a Dalí painting could speak, it would tell us this violently charming tale of ants marching in perfect circles and bodies pushed beyond the limits of the possible.” —Elizabeth Willis

“I’m not entirely sure what the fuck just happened, but, whatever you might say about Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre, you sure as hell will have something to say. A dizzying, macabre, yet ultimately deliriously delicious tale of medical testing, decapitations, botanically-born flesh-eating larvae, unrequited love, deformities, and extreme art, Comemadre won’t soon be easily forgotten (if ever it is). Larraquy, an Argentinean screenwriter who has also penned two books (Comemadre being the first translated into English), is whirlwindishly creative and evidently possessed of a prodigious, if darkly tinged, imagination.
Two distinct narratives, ultimately linked yet set 102 years apart, combine to grotesque and lasting effect. Larraquy writes fantastically and, however unlikely it may seem given its obsessive subjects, with considerable humor. The same unsettling, disquieting feeling one might be left with after engaging, say, Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye or fellow Argentinean author Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream is present in spades. Comemadre never flinches, however much its readers inevitably must. Comemadre lures, bedevils, and ultimately enamors—distending reality (and decency) in the process. Feral fiction at its finest, Larraquy’s Comemadre is beach reading if you inexplicably find yourself marooned with Piggy, Jack, Ralph, and the rest of Golding’s deserted island boys.” —Jeremy Garber




Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre is a short novel about heads and about bodies. It explores the fragile space between life and death, unveiling the alienation inherent in both. The throbbing pulse of the book, which ties together its many disparate and overlapping narratives, is a confrontation with the ways that self-realization can also lead to violence and the objectification of others.
The book is split into two primary narratives. The first takes place in Buenos Aires, 1907, and focuses on Doctor Quintana and his associates at the Temperley Sanatorium. Quintana is a character of considerable nuance, difficult to classify, in equal parts admirable and horrifying — a truly human portrait of a complicated individual. The Sanatorium’s owner and founder, Mr. Allomby, is interested in the notion that a head, once severed from the body, can survive for up to nine seconds. He tasks Quintana and the others with the seemingly impossible job of capturing these moments between life and death and interrogating them. Bypassing any semblance of medical ethics, they engage in a series of depraved experiments in search of answers and personal achievement. They focus on beheadings and attempt to extract from these severed heads nine second prophecies into the afterlife.
The bioethical questions in the story reveal the book’s fascination with locating the seed of individual human cruelty — what degree of collateral harm a person is willing to allow. Early in the novel Quintana addresses his medical superior about the moral implications of the experiment, but even as he does so he feels weak and worries about his position:

I’ve just told him that I think it might be necessary to ‘review — for lack of a better term — ethical aspect of the experiment, in the hope that . . . ’ and I feel an urgent need to erase my mouth, grab a scalpel and cut myself a new one, and then start over.

Their conversation continues and the superior responds by celebrating Quintana’s moral inclinations, even as he does nothing to practically address the concern:

“Your colleagues, Quintana . . . Your colleagues . . . None of them came to discuss this with me. They must be wearing out their rosaries right now, wondering whether they’re going to hell or what. You’re different. Trustworthy.”
“Thank you.”
“This business of speculating with the lives of cancer cases is pretty distasteful, wouldn’t you say? I agree. You need mettle, yes, but you can’t rub out the basic emotions that make us men, make us human. When we cut off that first head, that’s when we’ll see who’s who. The one with the steady hand, the one who feels no pity for the patient, that’s who we’ll need to fire. God only knows what he’s capable of.”

As suggested by this dialogue, the novel is not concerned with excoriating particular bad actions, and it would cheapen the text to read it as a mere dystopian warning against particular medical experimentation. The doctors’ cavalier attitude toward their patients’ potential suffering and their willingness to experiment with human bodies illustrates Larraquy’s broader conviction that our capacity for violence is more readily flexible than we like to believe.
As the doctors carry out these experiments, they are competing for position within the Sanatorium’s hierarchy. But they are also contending for the affections of head nurse Menéndez. The pursuit of Menéndez in many ways usurps the more fantastic elements in this first section of the book. Her fate becomes immediate and crucial to the reader. Larraquy achieves this effect by granting access to the grandiose internal narrative of Quintana and his maddening desire for Menéndez. Her story, much like the novel itself, borrows from different genres depending on the particular situation. At times it reads like a romance and, at other times, like a thriller. In the end, her fate is little different from that of the patients in the Sanatorium. Both she and the patients are made objects of the doctors’ insatiable curiosity, and everyone suffers for it.
The novel then jumps forward one hundred years. This second portion is almost entirely composed of a letter written by an Argentinian artist to an academic who has taken an interest in his work. The artist’s work is unveiled slowly and considerately through the story of his childhood and development as a prodigy. In a series of artistic concessions, the artist engages in extreme manipulation and transformation of his body. Our artist encounters his doppelganger, who so happens to also be an artist, and the two begin working together. The first modification our artist makes is to cut off his finger and hang it as part of their first joint exhibit. Modifications continue and become central to their work, eventually leading the artist to undergo surgery that will erase any slight differences between his face and the face of his look-alike. Many of the same themes are picked up anew in this second section: a focus on the body, the pursuit of sexual acceptance, and the ways that an unerring pursuit of a thing can, in fact, pervert the thing it pursues. Despite differing significantly in plot, the two sections of the novel are brought loosely together at the end, looping the mirrored themes through one another and leaving the reader with something akin to resolution.
Maintaining separate storylines throughout the first and second half of the novel is a unique facet of the text. Despite the scattered details and shared histories that eventually links the two narratives, there is very little in the plot that directly connects them, and their linkage relies on a thematic ascent. The polyphonic quality that results from the narratives sharing the same title enhances the sense of programmed disorder Comemadre naturally induces. The book is unsettling in its depiction of severed bodies, merciless characters, and ominous dreamscapes. Creating this sense of disturbance seems to be a part of Larraquy’s artistic intent. By unmooring the reader, he creates a reading experience that allows for shock in the face of violence, an increasingly difficult task for an artist. Juxtaposing two disparate stories allows the form to match the disconcerting content.
Comemadre is Larraquy’s second novel, but his first to be translated into English. It’s a complicated text, one that defies easy categorization, in a large part due to its wordplay. Heather Cleary (who has translated César Rendueles, Sergio Chejfec, and a selection of Oliverio Girondo) does a glorious job at capturing the nuance and the comedy of Larraquy’s language. For example,

I stand so my feet are aligned with hers. Must I approach her now, or do I have some time to spare? Time it is. One of my shoelaces extends across the room, laces itself through her shoe, inches up her uniform, wraps itself around each of her buttons, and ties itself in a delicate bow at her neck. If I gave a good kick, those buttons would go flying.

As it is in this scene, the absurd is planted and buried throughout Comemadre, creating a sense of constant doubt and uncertainty. The writing is sparse and evocative, even as it takes considerable risks. The effect accomplishes a great deal in short spaces.
By tempering even the darkest of moments of the story with grand metaphors, scathing interiority, and the comically absurd, Larraquy pulls the rug out from under the reader’s despair, humanizing the seemingly inhuman cruelty of its characters. It’s essential that the story feels empathetic and relatable if Larraquy is to effectively raise questions of cruelty, alienation, and guilt. The comedy of the text allows the reader to form a certain kinship with the characters, while their increasing cruelty forces the reader to reckon with the centrality of violence in the lives of these deeply human characters.
Comemadre is a story about the limits of science and discovery, about the purpose and process of art, about the dangers of the unchecked male ego, and much more. Beneath each of these distinct intentions, though, the book is not fundamentally theoretical, but relational. Larraquy imagines a complicated world of webbed human bonds that span generations. Each of these bonds is pulling on another, creating unique tension, unique threats, and unique possibilities. Larraquy’s scientists and artists attempt to uncover their true natures on both personal and existential fronts. In the process, their desire to be validated and accepted by others becomes all-encompassing. As these relationships carry the narrative and take center stage, it becomes apparent that guilt and desire can easily transform into violence once acted upon. The profound tragedy suggested by Comemadre is that in the absence of extended validation, that validation is too often stolen by force. At the book’s fundamentally relational foundation, Larraquy demonstrates that the tenderness which results from shared vulnerability is often undergirded by a violence springing from the same source. - Stephen Mortland
www.full-stop.net/2018/07/17/reviews/stephen-mortland/comemadre-roque-larraquy/

Comemadre begins in 1907 in Buenos Aires. A doctor at a sanatorium is in love with a nurse. Other doctors are also in love with the nurse. Other doctors have built a contraption to sever the heads of unwitting (and then willing) patients. The doctors have a theory: if the head can live for a few moments after being severed, perhaps it can see into the afterlife. The aforementioned head-chopper is fitted with a device to allow the heads to talk. The doctors record the results.

There are moments in the first half of this novella that ache with a kind of horrifying melancholy. The first to lose her head, for example, is a young patient of the sanatorium. She has wanted to die, the logic goes, so why not put her out of her misery? Then her bereaved lover follows suit. Then there’s a plan, and the heads really begin to roll. Throughout it all our narrator, Quintana, keeps his focus on the nurse. The doctors are mostly unfazed by the large-scale murder.

A scene toward the end of the first section, in which a great number of decapitations yield brief descriptions of post-severed utterances, is the highlight of the book. It’s sad, funny, and pitch-perfect. The 1907 portion ends on a dark, accurate note, and one can’t help but wonder if the book would have greatly improved from simply ending there.

The second half of the novella jumps forward in time a hundred years. A performance artist and his look-alike stage shows featuring severed body parts, eventually their own. It’s in this second half that Larraquy seems to lose a bit of focus. Whereas the 1907 half is darkly comic and focused, the 2009 half feels like it’s falling apart page by page. Which, when put into the context of degeneration and severing and corporeal decay, makes a bit of artistic sense.

Comemadre seems to be circling around a point within its second half. Instead of sociopathic doctors scheming to trick people into giving up their heads for science, we have artists dispassionately utilizing those parts for art. The attempt to connect the two falls flat. At one point we discover that a “modern-day” character is in fact related to Quintana. An artist wants to build a system of guillotines based on plans he’s found from the old sanatorium. It feels, paradoxically, simultaneously like being fed a cliché and not quite getting what the book is trying to say.

With clear prose, dark humor, and a sense of humanity tucked behind all the morbidity, Comemadre is an uneven novella with one classic scene and a grim reminder of the disintegration of the body and the even quicker decay of the morality of powerful men. - J. David Osborne

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/september/comemadre-roque-larraquy

The year is 1907 and a medical director at a clinic in Temperley, Argentina — a province of Buenos Aires — presents a French study to his colleagues. The proposition of the study in short: the human head remains conscious with full use of its faculties for nine seconds after decapitation. The tradition of an executioner holding the head aloft after chopping it off is only in part for the audience. It is also for the decapitated head — providing it the final spectacle of the cheering crowd.
This French study — with no facts or references, as one colleague points out — is the occasion for Argentine writer Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre. Translated by Heather Cleary, this is Larraquy’s debut novel in English and it arrives like a shockwave. It has already earned the wonder and admiration of contemporary horror stars like Brian Evenson and Samanta Schweblin. Schweblin writes, “Here I am, days after reading it, still asking myself what kind of book it is. Is it humor? Horror? Is it about art? Science? Philosophy? One thing is certain: it is just the kind of book that you’ll want to recommend to your friends over and over again.”
The nearly indescribable approach is part of the fun of Comemadre, especially given the confidence and poise of its delivery. “This is what I propose,” the medical director says to the room. “We select a group of terminally ill patients and sever their heads without damaging their vocal apparatus […] We then ask the heads to tell us what they observe.” In the perspective of despicable Doctor Quintana, we carry out this absurd and horrifying experiment.
While the characters in Comemadre sometimes pause to hesitate over the ethics of persuading their patients to consent to a life-ending experiment, they all tend to err on the side of science, or at least improving their own alpha standings in the sanatorium. Each man in this story is also smitten with Nurse Menéndez; in the competition to see who can secure the most volunteers, the competitors care less about the professional bonus than the opportunity to impress their crush. “We’ll go out to dinner once a week. And to the opera,” Quintana says to Menéndez in one of the sections that resembles a scrappy love letter. “When no one’s around, I’ll nibble your backside. I’ll give you a stole to cover your neck, and you’ll remove it only for me.”
But the desperate and sweaty-palmed pursuit of Menéndez acts as more of a fuel than a distraction for their mission, and incredibly, the experiment works. One decapitated head says, “Welcome,” and another “Just like I dreamed.” The heads say, “He doesn’t love me,” “Children last,” and “No eyes or nose, but a mouth.” Not all of the chopped heads speak, but most of them do. Each time you think the experiment has reached a feasible end, it continues. Before long, the doctors feel that nine seconds is too short for proper analysis. Quintana reveals his new vision to his colleagues: “Multiple devices, in a circle. Donors looking at one another. The guillotines activating sequentially, every nine seconds. Each head picking up where the last one left off to make a full sentence, a paragraph […] A string of words worth the expense and efforts of this team.”
To startling effect, this already-short novel reaches a surreal and sudden end when it abruptly splits, launching us to Buenos Aires in 2009 into a new story about the moral and bodily limits of the contemporary art world. The two sections are connected by, among other things, Quintana’s great grandson Sebastian. Sebastian has inherited a variety of his great grandfather’s possessions, including notes and manuscripts and vials of the black powder of the title plant. This plant’s sap produces anomalous microscopic animal larvae that can make a body digest itself. As it’s explained in the book, the Spanish name for the plant died out in Patagonia years ago, but it lives on in England as motherseeker or mothersicken. In the sanatorium in 1907, Quintana used it to successfully address the problem of the pile of bodies generated by the experiment. Quintana’s great grandson uses it again, in a way that again goes beyond what we once thought feasible. Comemadre shocks on each page, and it’s also very funny. It is absurd and straight-faced and frighteningly self-assured.
The characters in Comemadre can be a lot to stomach; the doctors are xenophobic misogynists who talk of eugenics. The artists are self-saboteurs and pain-seekers. They are almost all egomaniacs. But in pursuit of their madness and defense of their image, these characters tend to end up under the knife themselves. In the first section, one researcher insists very quickly on participating in the experiment; they accidentally bobble his head post-decapitation, muting his final speech. In the second, two artists can’t agree on which should get facial reconstructive surgery so they look exactly the same. They finally agree what’s most fair is to choose a third face to imitate, and both have their noses readjusted and skulls shaved.
Part of the horrifying joy of this novel is how safely you can rest in the hands of a maniac as the narrative world is built and burned down around you. In a scene in the first story, we encounter Quintana persuading a patient to consent to the life-ending experiment. The man is of Italian descent and Quintana explains that Mother Nature is wise and it had endowed southern Italians with high levels of potassium. Unfortunately, he says, the potassium affects the chemical structure of the serum (a placebo) they had used to try to fight the patient’s cancer. Quintana is clear and confident, and the patient agrees to the experiment. “The patient doesn’t understand,” Quintana says, “but it’s enough for him that I do.” No reader would be able to know where this story is going. But it’s enough that Larraquy does. - Nathan Scott McNamara
https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/horrifying-joy-roque-larraquys-comemadre/


Let’s begin with death. “Let’s say that in the course of all human experience, death is pure conjecture: it is, as such, not an experience. And all that which is not an experience is useless to mankind.” The speaker here is Ledesma, one of a cadre of lovelorn, thoroughly chauvinistic doctors up to no good at a sanatorium just outside Buenos Aires. The year is 1907 and the hospital’s director, through a preposterous ratcheting of macho brinksmanship, has inveigled his staff into carrying out a radical procedure to plumb the afterlife. Volunteers lured by the promise of a miracle cure for their inoperable cancers are sweet-talked into donating their bodies to science, then promptly beheaded under observation. In the flickering seconds of brain activity remaining, the heads are asked to report on the other side. A few of their enigmatic responses are worth repeating: “Children last,” “Just like I dreamed,” and the puzzling declaration “There are people who don’t exist.” Unsatisfied with these teasers, our narrator Dr. Quintana recommends a rapid sequence of decapitations, so a dozen heads will speak in turn, together voicing an eloquent stanza or a “string of words worth the expense.” Then the staff have an asado, quaff wine, and go ice skating.
And that’s only a morsel from the first half of Argentine writer Roque Larraquy’s slim novel Comemadre, now available in an English translation by Heather Cleary. The second half is, joltingly, set in 2009 and concerns the reminiscences of a world-famous nine-fingered contemporary artist (the missing finger is part of an installation, of course). He takes us painfully through his catalogue raisonné, starting with a childhood as an obese prodigy, moving on to a lusty mid career, and culminating in a cretinous, if not spectacular, act of vanity (hint: it involves surgery and carnivorous larvae.) “If the world shames me, if even the most vulgar creatures look good next to me, it’s without my consent,” he says.
The two stories eventually dovetail, as the artist, in search of evermore uncouth subject matter, breeches the legacy of Quintana’s sanatorium—but in getting there we’re treated to a pair of surreal gothic tales of science and art, each reaching their convergent point of annihilation. Grotesque, outrageous, and insanely funny, the novel has almost no equal in literature; all that cavorts into mind are chronicles of excess, like Bataille’s Story of the Eye or Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden.
Unholy itself, and pointedly about the subject of unholiness, Comemadre is the kind of humanistic text that awakens one’s “inner primate,” an atavism much discussed by the characters. It’s a perverse comfort in the long night of the soul, a horror in the light of the day, and it might even jolt a resigned reader into reappraising some of the things that make literature worthwhile, even if you wind up losing your head in the bargain. - J.W. McCormack
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/roque-larraquys-comemadre/

The title of the deeply unsettling and beautiful new book from Coffee House Press names a carnivorous plant, the comemadre, that produces an organism that devours its own mother: “a plant with acicular leaves whose sap produces (in a leap between taxonomic kingdom that warrants further study) microscopic animal larvae. These larvae devour the plant, leaving only tiny particles behind: the remains then spread to take root in the soil, and the process begins again.” With the constant presence of this flesh-eating, matricidal plant, Comemadre explores the extent of corporal manipulation to which some people will go in the search for transcendence.
Written by Argentine author Roque Larraquy and brilliantly translated by Heather Cleary, this novel is composed of two loosely-connected stories that explore scientific and artistic modes of dissecting the body in the hopes of learning about something that exists beyond reality. In the first half, a group of doctors at a sanatorium on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in the beginning of the twentieth century learn that an individual continues to be conscious for nine seconds after his or her head has been severed from the body. With this in mind, they set up an elaborate experiment meant to induce the patients—or victims—to articulate their experience in those nine seconds. The second half takes us nearly a decade into the twenty-first century, introducing the reader to an artist and his double who, in the name of art, destroy bodies by severing fingers, surgically transfiguring themselves into another man, and introducing the comemadre to a man’s leg. While the two halves more or less read as separate stories, they are connected by themes of the body, sexual desire, and knowledge, tiny details or imagery that reappear, such as little metal frogs, and family connections. As a whole, this is a meticulous and startling exploration of the male body and monstrosity.
While the novel does provide a glimpse into the two historical contexts, signaling the role of the medical institution in early twentieth-century Argentina and depicting the twenty-first century middle class, this is a novel about the corpus. The narrative explores masculinity, male desire, and sexuality while also raising questions about the body as a commodity and the connection between body and identity. For example, ethical dilemmas are raised in the preparations for the experiment but are solved by the separation of body and self, as the doctors argue: “As far as I’m concerned, once the blade does its work, Juan-or-Luis Pérez is no more and what we have is a head, with functions limited to those of a head.” Paralleling such discussions, however, various animals creep and crawl across the pages as a constant reminder of the potential for the perfection of form and to mark that the text is operating within a liminal space:

I look out the window: there are the ants, marching around their crack in a perfect circle. They are the animal reality nearest to me (I could go down there and smudge out that circle with my foot), along with the flies in Sylvia’s face, Papini’s apes, the Cartesian duck, and the hypothetical amphibian lurking inside Menéndez.

The setting of the sanatorium, the animal imagery, and the heads severed in the name of science, suggest that this text is operating in a space on the fringe of society, and even of humanity.
While the first half of the book is stronger in its narrative cohesion and effect, the second half excels in its experimentation as perspectives, style, and form shift quite fluidly while also creating subtle bridges to the first half. Relics and traces of the past continuously show up throughout the text, effectively conflating and manipulating time. Severed heads, photographs of hands, metal frogs, scars, notebooks, and the act of writing are prominent throughout the novel. At the same time, however, the book is haunted by a plant that devours evidence, that erases that intersection of time. The language, which Cleary does a remarkable job transforming into English, draws the reader into the story, making him or her complicit in the horror through his or her spectatorship. The consumption of this novel is quick, but the text will inevitably continue to haunt its reader. - Sarah Booker
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2018/07/09/whats-new-in-translation-july-2018/

There is a plant “whose sap produces […] microscopic animal larvae” that can consume rats “from the inside out.” It can only be found on “Thompson Island, a small landmass in Tierra Del Fuego,” within Argentinian screenwriter Roque Larraquy’s debut novel Comemadre—the name of this plant of spontaneous generation. Translated in the novel as “motherseeker or mothersicken,” this fictitious plant and its larvae symbolize the dual powers of violence to create and destroy. First as crime, then as art. It is an unmistakably self-conscious symbol for an unrepentantly self-conscious novel, going so far as to have the artist-narrator of the second part dissecting a biographer’s write-up of him and his legacy. Thankfully this consciousness doesn’t eat the novel from the inside out. However, the primary issue of the novel is precisely the necessarily maximalist philosophy this consciousness requires for its slim 129 pages. By the time the comemadre plant has been introduced on page 74, it becomes just another symbol in a long chain of symbols as opposed to the centralizing (and titular) symbol it intends to be.
The comemadre is even introduced as “a botanical digression.” A digression from what, you may wonder? By this point, the initial narrator, Quintana, a doctor at Temperly Sanatorium in 1907 Buenos Aires, has already dragged the reader through a minefield of concepts. First, he ogles the head nurse, Menendez, who, he says, “fits entirely into the space of those words.” Her existence is reduced to the textual and external. Menendez, instead of being pregnant with meaning, becomes a pregnant pause, the ellipses of her identity-concealing occupation. Then a coworker and rival for Menendez’s attention, Papini, tells a layered joke about a “‘fellow [killing] his wife because she wouldn’t tell him what she was doing on the bidet’” in order to explain phrenology. This is followed by a demonstration by the head doctor:

Next to [the duck] is a wooden box of average size. Its lid, which opens down the middle, has a large, round aperture at its center, bordered by the word ergo. Under the lid is a blade that shoots out horizontally with the speed and force of a crossbow. On the sides of the box, next to the reliefs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, are the words cogito and sum, respectively.

The head doctor decapitates the duck, its head “[remaining] on the ergo,” while “it looks at us. Or thinks the thoughts of a duck.” This demonstration is followed by a report from an eighteenth-century doctor who recorded a similar event in humans at the guillotine. It’s at this point, fourteen pages in, that we arrive at the guiding story of Comemadre: Can the doctors of Temperley Sanatorium convince patients to be guillotined and then get them to talk about the afterlife? In other words, unlike these preceding moments of textual and external understanding, can the doctors transcend exteriority?
Probably not, as several images later (including a fake serum, tin frogs, and circling ants) Quintana’s story concludes with his visceral and violent act of propagation upon Menendez; Quintana, in pursuit of transcendence, makes a mother of her, becoming the motherseeker eating her from the inside out. The savagery of this (pro)creative act is reduced in the second part, taking place in 2009. Here, all that remains of Quintana is his journal, which becomes the inspiration for a final art piece for the artist-narrator and his partner, Quintana’s great-grandson. To be frank, the problem this poses is too great for the novel to overcome: the holistic feeling of Quintana’s story, as troubled as it is by abundance, is broken apart in the section of the novel that reads like an extended afterword. Over-comprehensive is the word. There is too much weighing on Quintana’s story to recontextualize and revitalize it effectively. On its own, in fact, Quintana’s story would have been complicatedly interesting. It resembles Ernesto Sabato’s 1948 Argentinean classic The Tunnel, another story of obsession and the possibility of transcendence. A refreshing, Modernist turn.
As it is, however, Comemadre is not a bad debut in the slightest. Roque Larraquy is a strong monologist. One of the most memorable moments being the previously mentioned explanation of phrenological characters via a man’s curiosity about what his wife does with a bidet. The second part, insomuch as it is an extended monologue, hits the right notes for a narrator-artist with such memorable lines as “I think, no one likes a child prodigy in a Dior vest.” And while his characters often border on tropes—Doctor Papini is a familiar figure as the big idea, all bravado comic relief—there does remain an air of mystery about Quintana’s motives. At times indifferent as Mersault in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, at times as technically cruel as the Nazi doctor Mengele. A concentration camp survivor once said that “I have never accepted that Mengele believed he was doing serious medical work […] He was exercising power.” This would be a fitting description of Quintana. Strikingly, Josef Mengele fled to Buenos Aires after World War II.
And as for the translation by Heather Cleary, it is hard to imagine Comemadre functioning as effectively as it does without her. Much like her work on Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark, she brings clarity to writing that is dense and overflowing. While these two projects are markedly different—Chejfec’s writing is mazy, Larraquy’s is layered—they both require a translator that can parse their complications. What rough edges exist in this novel are inherent to the novel. Quintana, observing the doctors of the Sanatorium applauding their American benefactor for proposing to head nurse Menendez, notes that she is “condensed, made material; she adopts her decisive form.” This would be an accurate description of Cleary’s contribution to the novel as well.
At the end of the description of the guillotine box for the Cartesian duck it follows: “the phrase and figures clearly bear allegorical weight, which diminishes the charm of the whole.” A more fully formed reflection on Comemadre doesn’t exist. Just as the comemadre larvae spontaneously generate in the plant’s sap, symbols seem to spontaneously generate in the leaves of the book. The larvae themselves are stored in a black powder that is described by the artist-narrator of the second part as having “an irregular texture.” Comemadre has an irregular texture. It wants to mean too much, so much that it inserts addendums to inform you of its intent. Perhaps Archibald Macleish’s final words in “Ars Poetica” are overstated. But when I read almost wonderful novels like this one I’m still reminded of them: “A poem should not mean/but be.” - Justin Goodman
www.cleavermagazine.com/comemadre-a-novel-by-roque-larraquy-reviewed-by-justin-goodman/

Comemadre, according to one of the narrators of Argentine Roque Larraquy’s short, eponymous novel, is “a plant with acicular leaves whose sap produces (in a leap between taxonomic kingdoms that warrants further study) microscopic larvae. These larvae devour the plant, leaving only tiny particles behind; the remains then spread to take root in the soil, and the process begins again.” The only remaining samples of comemadre belong to British gangsters who use it to dispose of evidence, much the way Larraquy himself seems to have done, narratively speaking, with his invented plant. In spite of its titular prominence, comemadre appears only fleetingly in the novel, as if it had been consumed by the larvae of other plot devices, and yet its metaphorical sap is everywhere. Comemadre is a book about liminality, the spaces and connective tissues between things, and the transformations that take place in transit from one world to another, whether they are the taxonomic kingdoms of art and science, or life and death.
Comemadre is divided into two parts. The first takes place in 1907, at a sanatorium in Temperley, Argentina. The narrator is one Doctor Quintana, a physician at quack clinic offering a miracle cancer cure that reels in terminal patients who are then cajoled into participating in a grandiose, metempsychotic research experiment: to learn what awaits us after death. Led by their boss, Quintana and the rest of the clinic staff launch a “scientific” experiment under the hypothesis that, since the brain remains active for several seconds after decapitation, decapitated people will have a slim margin during which they can report on what they see. One of the doctors predicts that the “results will be more like poetry than prose… A fortune-teller’s opacity: ethereal nouns, verbs with no easily identifiable subjects.” When Quintana and his colleagues at last get down to guillotining their patients, their experiment unravels, as does Quintana’s authority over the story he’s telling, which itself seems to become a report from a different world.
The second part of Comemadre is set in Buenos Aires, in 2009. The narrator is an obese gay artist who is responding to a dissertation about his life and work by a scholar at Yale. His novelistic annotation tells the story of his sentimental education from lonely child genius to art-world phenom after he meets a doppelgänger who imitates him and becomes his collaborator. Like the Temperley doctors, he uses the human body—his own, however, in his case—to test the boundaries of human experience. And through a stranger former lover, his story ends up folding backs into Quintana’s a century later.
Comemadre is as weird as it sounds, but way funnier than it sounds. It is absurdist theater with an ache for transcendence. Stubbornly oblique and intricately disjunctive (the two parts’ stories’ ends feel fittingly decapitated), the novel reads like fragments from some great beyond, which made me curious not just about the gaps the reader must fill in, but Larraquy’s process of creating them. We emailed during several weeks.
—Aaron Shulman


read the interview with the author here