You know how sometimes you don’t really like a book until you read the very last sentence and you realize that you love it? This is my experience of the novel Mil cosas by Juan Tallón. I did not like it. I thought it was a drag until the very end, when I went, “Oh wow, what an amazing novel.”
I only read Mil cosas because a friend asked me to. He’s written an article on it and wants my opinion. The novel is short, and I listened to it on Audible, but I kept getting distracted because the novel wasn’t managing to capture me a whole lot. But then the last sentence totally made it worth it, so thanks, friend.
The novel reads like it was written to prove my theory of neoliberal subjectivity. Every element is there. I’m so good. But that’s not why I like the novel. What I really enjoy is to see a writer who cares about art more than likes. I like an author who doesn’t care about being liked at all. You need a lot of chutzpah to hold out until the very end of a novel. People have increasingly short attention spans, and many will simply quit reading. Also, Mil cosas is a novel that needs to be read twice in order to be understood completely, and most people will not want to invest the time and effort into that.
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