Customer Reviews

No Word From Gurb

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Originally published in serial form in a Spanish newspaper in 1990, No Word From Gurb is the diary of an alien who, along with his co-pilot Gurb, lands in Barcelona for the purposes of research and exploration. The two aliens can adopt any physical form they choose, and Gurb, in order to blend in, chooses to disguise himself as Madonna--the singer, not the virgin. Gurb leaves the spaceship and immediately disappears, leaving his worried and unnamed partner to search for him.

Gurb is not sci-fi, it's just silly, and I mean that as a compliment. Mendoza is an excellent comic writer, able to make his befuddled alien a lovable character, while at the same time delivering industrial quantities of parody and absurdist humour. There are many laugh out loud moments, and probably a lot more if you're familiar with Spanish culture and politics.

One example of sublime absurdity comes when the alien is describing his problems with keeping the different parts of his human body at the right temperature: "The worst is my head, perhaps due to the intense intellectual activity going on there. Its temperature is sometimes in excess of 150C. In order to lessen the effects of this heat, I always wear a top hat, and fill the inside with ice cubes I buy in service stations. Unfortunately, this is only a temporary solution. The ice soon melts, the water boils and the hat is sent up into the air with such force that first ones I had are still somewhere in the air."

There's almost a Lewis Carroll quality to that passage. Mendoza has also written a trilogy of comic detective novels featuring a thief who lives in an insane asylum, but is let out on occasion by the police in order to solve difficult crimes. I've read the first, The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt, and it's excellent, in a silly sort of way.

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This book is hilarious in English and Spanish. In the English translation, a few of the names are changed to create more familiarity amongst English speakers but nothing is lost. Very clever book. Definitely laugh out loud.

Eduardo Mendoza is overlooked as a significant Spanish author. This book is a great read - if you want to laugh out loud, pick this book up - you will not be disappointed and then read the rest of his translated novels.

A small book that takes very little time to be read...except for the (many) times you'll stop to laugh out loud. At least that's what happened with the tenths of people to which I gave this book as a present. My only concern is: will the fun be lost in translation, or depend too much on aspects that are familiar to Spaniards but maybe not to foreigners?

I highly recommend most of Mendoza's books, some which are also very funny (Misterio de la Cripta Embrujada) and other more serious, with very interesting style and approach (La verdad sobre el caso Savolta), all of them with interesting views of Barcelona and its society as a background.

The entire book is written as a series of diary (Captain's log) entries. At the start of the book, I thought this would get old very quickly, but 25% of the way through, it had become pretty interesting. As I continued reading, however, the book became rather monotonous and dull, as though I were reading a bunch of Twitter posts . The author seems to stop including wit in the character's log entries, which was really the only thing saving this book (since there's very little plot). There is no climax to speak of, and in the end, the status quo is really no different than it was on page 3. There are no twists, no real plot to pique the reader's interest. For example, if you skip 20 pages at any point after the first 10 pages, you really will have missed nothing, and it will seem like you just picked up where you left off (the main character walking through his surroundings, making observations which may have been humorous at the beginning, but are becoming quite old).

There is one line I particularly liked though, which reads roughly as, "Children do whatever they want to do, adults do the same thing but get paid for it." If only it were that simple.