He's then taken to the secret lair of a drug king to discuss, among other topics, creativity, art and the aesthetics of postmodernism.Īnd here are the opening lines from three more JH blasters: In one story, an artist agonizes over the prospect that his ghastly pornography will actually wind up as a killing machine in another piece, a conceptual artist picks sheet music from his teeth only to find out the hard way his creation is anything but original in yet another, the title work, the narrator, a film critic, watches as the front door of his house is blown out by a bazooka. **Thanks to the author, translators, publisher, and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.īring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by contemporary Mexican author Julián Herbert - nine short stories and one novella collected here, stories that zoom along in hallucinogenic overdrive, stories that will - this time in English - blow your mind. The other stories, while not as virtuosic, are a great read as well, entertaining, thought provoking, and enlightening. It's a mouthful to describe but it is a very fun ride. The titular novella is a masterpiece, combining academic explorations of Tarantino's movies (including a discussion of parody and its authenticity and the similarities between Shakespeare and Tarantino's characters' soliloquies), a Tarantino-esque tale of frustrated bloody-minded assassins sent to kill the director, and a memoir of a film critic (who is the author of the academic passages) kidnapped by a drug cartel leader who happens to look exactly like Quentin Tarantino (and who sent the assassins to the US to kill his lookalike). But a hundred and forty television channels and fifty music stations, plus ten hard-porn signals and a universal pay-per-view password, all free, is the sort of bribe that no one, not even a cannibalistic Lacanian psychoanalyst, can resist." The zombie-ish story Z is probably the most explicit example of this, with its allegory of cannibalistic zombies still hungering for illegal TV: The topics are wide ranging, but all have at the core of them the idea of corruption, and how everyone in contemporary Mexican culture is corrupted by the drug trade and its effects on government, economics, and daily life. Short stories and a novella with that perfect postmodern mix of comedy and existential depression, genre and literary, style and substance. The ballad of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Herbert asks: Where are the lines between fiction, memory, and reality? What is the relationship between power, corruption, and survival? How much violence can a person (and a country) take? The stories in this explosive collection showcase the fevered imagination of a significant contemporary writer. The antic and dire stories in Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino depict the violence and corruption that plague Mexico today, but they are also deeply ruminative and layered explorations of the narrative impulse and the ethics of art making. Herbert’s astute observations about human nature in extremis feel like the reader’s own revelations. Here we become acquainted with a vengeful “personal memories coach” who tries to get even with his delinquent clients a former journalist with a cocaine habit who travels through northern Mexico impersonating a famous author of Westerns the ghost of Juan Rulfo a man who discovers music in his teeth and, in the deliriously pulpy title story, a drug lord who looks just like Quentin Tarantino, who kidnaps a mopey film critic to discuss Tarantino’s films while he sends his goons to find and kill the doppelgänger that has colonized his consciousness. In this madcap, insatiably inventive, bravura story collection, Julián Herbert brings to vivid life people who struggle to retain a measure of sanity in an insane world. Virtuosic stories by one of “the more interesting and ambitious prose stylists of our time” ( Los Angeles Times)
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