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Tears of the Trufflepig

9780374720148 fc
Paperback, MCD × FSGO, 2019
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Flores  fernando by eric morales

Fernando A. Flores

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LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE. One of Tor.com's Best Books of 2019.

"Readers of this breakout work [will leave] thrilled and disoriented in equal measure." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal


One of The Daily Beast's Best Summer Beach Reads of 2019, one of Lit Hub and The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2019, one of Buzzfeed and Tor.com's Books to Read This Spring, and one of the Chicago Review of Books' Best New Books of May


A parallel universe. South Texas. A third border wall might be erected between the United States and Mexico, narcotics are legal and there’s a new contraband on the market: filtered animals—species of animals brought back from extinction to amuse the very wealthy.

Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life gets complicated after a swashbuckling journalist invites him to an underground dinner at which filtered animals are served. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous and surreal journey, in the course of which he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers.

Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores’s Tears of the Trufflepig is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, and an introduction to a staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction.

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An excerpt from Tears of the Trufflepig

One


Bellacosa walked carefully over the rotting planks, unsure if this was the shack where he was born. Its roof was missing, and he looked up at the aluminum sky. It hadn’t caved in, so he figured some South Texas zephyr galloped away with it. He stomped down hard and fine orange dust lifted and formed a ghost in his own image, eager to dance or play cards, then sank back down into the cracks. He lit a Herzegovina Flor cigarette and murmured, “Somebody out there isn’t doing their job,” noticing he’d dirtied his authentic, ostrich-knee Wingham dress shoes. He tried to imagine what the place could’ve looked like all those decades ago—where his mother gave birth, what the hustling midwife looked like, where his father stood wringing his hat. The shack was small, as he’d expected. He didn’t know why, but he thought there’d be no floor. The planks surprised him.

He walked out of the threshold as if emerging from quicksand and smoked the rest of the Herzegovina Flor by his old Jeep, admiring the cavity structure on the dry, barren farmland. The sky was different than it appeared from inside, giving the impression time had never changed in the shack, and the rooms where we are born keep giving birth to us forever. The sun was rising. It was a roosterless dawn, in the part of South Texas where no beast yawned.

The old Jeep sped down the even older military surplus road. It had one of those stereos with the knobs and the needle, and quietly a corrido sang to Bellacosa, “Y llegaron Noviembre, y Diciembre, y Enero, Febrero, Marzo, y Abril.

He was doubtful now that that had been the shack, and as the pavement ended and the old Jeep hit the powdery road Bellacosa slowed down, feeling strangely relieved that his birthplace was still a mystery to him.

A few days prior, when he learned he’d have to make the drive to Calantula County, Bellacosa stopped by the records office for a copy of his birth certificate. His parents had been migrant workers and Bellacosa was the only of their two sons to be born in America, for which he felt grateful. Though he’d always been poorer than his brother, Oswaldo, down in Mexico, he could still cross back and forth without too many problems, and in his line of work this came in handy. Bellacosa was a widower trying to pull himself out of debt, but he never felt that he lacked for anything. He’d learned, unlike many people in South Texas, not to curse God for his problems, for his deep losses. All my grievances and disgraces have been my own, he’d say, and it’s the divine spirit that throws me bones now and then.

Bellacosa arrived at the McMasters property on time, 7:30 a.m. He parked by the doghouse-sized mailbox on the edge of the property, turned off the old Jeep, and waited for the cloud of dust from the road to pass by. Bellacosa knew he’d have to talk to the Aranaña Indian farmer who cared for the land, and he was ready. He had no problem talking to these working Aranaña Indians. A lot of people now did, because of the stigma from the syndicates and shrunken heads, the filtering of animals. But it was all an accident. It wasn’t these people’s faults, these fucking Indians, he thought. After all, I’m a fucking Indian, we are all fucking Indians in the Valley. That’s why we’re here. And what the hell is a Mexican Indian, a mistake. Columbus thought he landed in India somewhere, so that’s what he called all these Mexicans. Fuck Columbus. Fuck the Indians. I’m an Indian, too. Fuck me.

Bellacosa got out of the old Jeep and climbed an embankment of dry ferns onto the property. There were moaning whirlwind pillars and tufts of raisin-eyed, pockmarked chickens clucking around. Before even saying a word to anybody, Bellacosa was already exhausted from the encounter he was about to have. He looked around for the 7900 Rig— what construction people call La Mano de Chango, and what the Americans call “the Claw,” a machine used to dig up large holes in the ground. He spotted the giant yellow bastard out back, moping, wanting to hug the ground like a friendless drunk with its one mechanical claw. It was nearby a tiny green trailer, where the farmer presumably lived, and about fifty feet to its left was a carpet of grain and feathers, boards nailed together like small bleachers, and a short, dry trough. It was the chicken coop, apparently, but the chicken wire that kept it together was missing. Markings on the thirsty ground outlined the coop about twenty-five by twelve feet, and standing on the feathers and grain, waving a denim hat around, was the farmer.

“You’re the one about the machine?” the man yelled at Bellacosa, in his high, singsong, campesino Spanish.

“I am. You Tranquilino?”

“Here to serve you. It’s just that this wind in the middle of the night, it took away the roof and the fences of my chickens. Mire nomas.” Tranquilino sighed. “The ground here is so dry the posts in every corner came off like toothpicks. My wife woke me, she thought the wind would take our little trailer, too. I’m a heavy sleeper since I don’t get much sleep, and when I woke everything was shaking, and the chickens were making a racket like they’re being attacked by coyotes like when I was a boy, y ayayay.”

Tranquilino pointed with his hat to an old black van propped on cinder blocks at the other side of the property, with chicken wire mounted where the doors ought to be, under a mesquite tree hunched like the hermit in the tarot. Installing the chicken wire was a boy no older than seven dressed like a barefoot basketball player, with taut and rugged features brown like the sun, his small hands pinching and twisting the wire using needle-nose pliers.

“I have my son Matador making a temporary coop out of my old van, where I lived as a bachelor. That pinche van gave me nothing but trouble. Maybe the chickens will have something else to say about it, we are giving it a chance with them.” Tranquilino squinted his eyes as if Bellacosa refracted light, then put his denim hat back on his balding head.

“So you just here for La Mano de Chango? Still runs well. I turn it on once a week and move it so it won’t expire. Just like everything else here expired. After the land expired first. You know, right before you got here I was standing there thinking the chicken coop flying away serves me right. It reminded me that it was me who let this land expire. Doesn’t look like much now, but that is my fault. I let it get this way.” Bellacosa looked around at the bones of the land as he listened to the farmer, and for a moment wondered if it still had running water.

“The jefe McMasters instructed me to let the crop die some time back. It was fine by me. To this day he still pays me to look after this land. Mr. McMasters no longer wanted to farm and distribute naturally grown onions since his company makes them now the filtering way much faster. But I could have continued maintaining the land myself without a problem. After all, I’m still living here. I could have found buyers for the onions, because people always want food that is grown organically. But I didn’t bother in those days, and everything died. Now the land has gone bad and nothing will grow. So after my son finishes, and all these chickens are put away, and you get what you came for, I’m gassing the tractor. My family and me will bring this land back to life. It’s what needs to happen.”

Tranquilino motioned Bellacosa to follow him. Bellacosa checked the time. It hadn’t been two hours since his last smoke, but he was on an empty stomach. He plucked out a Herzegovina Flor, offered one to Tranquilino.

“No, gracias,” Tranquilino said, pointing at a pile of bloody, pale leaves on the ground. Thick blood appeared to be slowly trickling away from its center, like organized army ants leaving their nest. Pinching the cigarette with his lips, Bellacosa took a good look: they were bright red ants, yes, the size of sunflower seeds, crawling all over a dead, twisted chicken. The ants were slowly carrying the chicken away.

“They are dragging the dead away like the calaveras del diablo. It is because of these ants my coop flew away, you see. Listen,” Tranquilino said, looking around. “Can you hear all that racket? That’s the company working for McMasters now drilling for something way over beyond that field of mesquite. They are in business with the government, I think. They must be drilling for gases or petroleum for the economy. We have been getting a lot of big ants here, because with the drilling they are driving them away. Now here they are all over this property. You think there is nothing under us but a world of ants now, with all the drilling?”

Bellacosa held the cigarette between two fingers like a pen and carefully surveyed the property. Everywhere he looked, there were veins of army ants draining the land itself of blood from right under them. The dried field where the onions had once grown was cracked, pallid, and tubercular. Through his peripheral vision Bellacosa thought he saw the earth shifting, felt like it was being encircled by an invisible army. It bothered him how confidently the ants carried that dead chicken, and whereas earlier he was confused as to why the farmer hadn’t stopped them, now he understood. Death was the order of the day.


Borderwall5

Kafka on the Border

Text and Photography by Fernando Flores

  • Tears of the Trufflepig is the most engagingly original novel I’ve read in ages. So phantasmagoric, fearlessly out there, and yet it feels like a revelation, piercingly true to gritty human experience and wild as anything you might sense lurking in the Borderland night. It’s the borderland speaking to you, a tale told from the future by the wiliest, funniest, most battle-scarred cabrón in the cantina. ”

    Francisco Goldman, author of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle
  • "I started to think this book was Juan Rulfo meets Philip K. Dick. But Fernando A. Flores smacked me in the head. He sidesteps cliches and expectations. We expect magical realism in a Latino novel as we have come to expect dystopian stories in a sci-fi novel, but his audacity is to ignore all expectations and shoot the moon in any way he chooses. Tears of the Trufflepig is thrilling. Flores has created his own genre."

    Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
  • “With his striking debut novel, Fernando A. Flores has refashioned a world I thought I knew—the Valley, Texas, the strange alchemy of life on a border—into a grotesquely yet familiar fever-dream. His imagined future captures the truth of our uncanny now with frightening accuracy. Funny and tragic and ultimately compelling, Tears of the Trufflepig is a gorgeous and unsettling read.”

    Manuel Gonzales, author of The Regional Office is Under Attack!
  • “In Tears of the Trufflepig, the metaphor and actuality of the borderlands shimmer together into a vision of haptic, granular, and superbly controlled, convincing reality. A deep dream. A clear-eyed hallucination. Studded with the sweet delayed snap of the nonchalant reveal, cunning details of new worlds—demimondes, hellscapes, mythic lands— bloom naturally from scene to scene. Fernando A. Flores writes like a hard-boiled psychotropic angel.”

    Eugene Lim, author of Dear Cyborgs
  • “Dear Reader, do you want to experience something wonderfully new, something dizzyingly wild, something utterly strange? Do you want to discover an imagination of beauty and humor and horror and majesty? Do you want to see the world afresh? If so, then Fernando A. Flores is for you. I know, for I have met the Trufflepig and I shall never be the same again.”

    Edward Carey, author of Little
  • Tears of the Trufflepig is of the most thrilling novels I’ve read in ages, a true wild original. By turns a surreal page-turner, a send-up of the consolidation of wealth, and an excavation of life on the border, this novel doesn’t bend genre: it explodes the precedents and creates something completely new. Fernando A. Flores is the kind of writer who will reinvigorate your faith in the power of literature.”

    Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
  • Tears of the Trufflepig is one of the most thrilling novels I’ve read in years, a true wild original. By turns a surreal page-turner, a send-up of the consolidation of wealth, and an excavation of life on the border, this novel doesn’t bend genre: it explodes the precedents and creates something completely new. Fernando A. Flores is the kind of writer who will reinvigorate your faith in the power of literature.”

    Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
  • “Fernando A. Flores has created a world that looks a lot like ours, but without the fat, without the self-complacency, and without the shadows that impede us from seeing the universal drama happening before our eyes. Tears of the Trufflepig is a beautiful story about the struggle between the profane and the sacred and what we can do about it.”

    Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
  • "A bizarre fever dream of a book made all the more frightening by its eerie plausibility . . . Flores never overplays his hand. Throughout the book, he grounds his vision of the future in enough realism that even the strangest parts of the story come across as plausible . . . Debut novels can be shaky affairs, but Flores writes like a seasoned veteran

    his structure and pacing are perfect. And he proves to be an expert at tone. The novel has a hard-boiled noir vibe, but Flores never indulges in the genre’s clichés. Tears of the Trufflepig is a beautifully crafted novel that asks serious questions but doesn’t lose its heart." --Michael Schaub, Texas Observer
  • "[Flores] understands the border in the way that many who come from there do

    those who have left and developed a perspective about it from new vantage points . . . This is an intelligent book. Literary, musical and historical references fill each chapter. It is a smorgasbord of cultural allusions that make up a kind of playground for readers who don’t offhandedly eschew what readers of world literature welcome, including the surreal elements . . . [Bellacosa] doesn’t want to be a hero. He just wants everyone to have a chance to move through the world as if the larceny, lies, corruption and violence were mere nuisances to work around." --Yvette Benavides, Houston Chronicle
  • "A bizarre fever dream of a book made all the more frightening by its eerie plausibility . . . Flores never overplays his hand. Throughout the book, he grounds his vision of the future in enough realism that even the strangest parts of the story come across as plausible . . . Debut novels can be shaky affairs, but Flores writes like a seasoned veteran

    his structure and pacing are perfect." --Michael Schaub, Texas Observer
  • "[Flores] understands the border in the way that many who come from there do

    those who have left and developed a perspective about it from new vantage points . . . This is an intelligent book. Literary, musical and historical references fill each chapter." --Yvette Benavides, Houston Chronicle
  • "[A] bonkers dystopia of deprivation and decadence . . . While Tears of the Trufflepig details a scabrous alternate version of the border region, it eventually inhabits a strange, dreamlike landscape of mystical encounters and psychedelic visions. The hallucinatory ending is also right out of Pynchon and will leave readers of this breakout work thrilled and disoriented in equal measure." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal"A bizarre fever dream of a book made all the more frightening by its eerie plausibility . . . Flores never overplays his hand. Throughout the book, he grounds his vision of the future in enough realism that even the strangest parts of the story come across as plausible . . . Debut novels can be shaky affairs, but Flores writes like a seasoned veteran

    his structure and pacing are perfect." --Michael Schaub, Texas Observer "Bizarre, macabre, and wryly funny . . . [Tears of the Trufflepig] is a work that’s cutting and frank—not by being confrontational or by being a dystopian lament. It’s blunter, more matter-of-fact in its presentation of the horrors and absurdities that a not-so-implausible future could hold, because the present already holds them." --Joshua Rivera, The Nation "[Tears of the Trufflepig] feels a bit like the classics of the novela negra of Latin America—think Paco Ignacio Taibo II or Rafael Bernal—were fused with a Philip K. Dick book. It’s darkly funny at times, to boot . . . Flores really captures the essence of living at the border." --Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Washington Post"The plot lines in Trufflepig are funhouse mirrors, reflecting the horrors of both our history and our headlines . . . But it’s the narrative that delights. When so much fiction feels like elegant dioramas, like masterfully crafted ships in bottles, Trufflepig feels organic and amorphous, like some biological organism, shape-shifting its way through the literary landscape, leaving a thin ribbon of goo in its wake." --J. David Gonzales, Los Angeles Review of Books"[Flores] understands the border in the way that many who come from there do
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