Hailed as a by reviewers and fellow writers in the Spanish-speaking world, Minimosca is the third novel by Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Gustavo Faverón Patriau.
The book is now among the three finalists for one of the biggest prizes in Spanish language fiction, the Finestres Award for Best Novel of 2024.
After being presented in fifteen cities on both sides of the Atlantic during a whirlwind literary tour by the author, has seen five editions flying off the shelves since its publication in late November.
The title of the novel alludes to the mini-flyweight category in combat sports—indeed, one of the characters is a boxer who, instead of using his fists, knocks out opponents by reciting poetry. More deeply, Faverón says Minimosca is an exploration of violence and how it is portrayed in many forms and settings. This includes political and everyday violence in literature, cinema, painting, sculpture, and performative arts, as well as the history of violence in Latin America and elsewhere over the last century.
Described as “a labyrinth in the form of a novel,” Minimosca tells intertwined stories involving a myriad of characters in Faverón’s native Peru, the Balkans, Bolivia, Germany, France, Poland, Armenia, Guatemala, Mexico, San Francisco, Ithaca, New York, Utah, and, yes, Brunswick, Maine.
The novel’s popularity is matched by its exceptional critical reception throughout Spain and Latin America. Critics have referred to it as “an instant classic” (Zenda); “one of the most inspiring cultural productions of the twenty-first century” (El Hype); “a joyful celebration of pure fiction and extreme imagination” (El Mundo); “only paralleled in recent memory by William Gaddis’s The Recognitions” (Joan Constans); “a monumental honeycomb-novel” (Fietta Jarque); “an exceptional novel whose original, fragmentary vision of solitude lets us understand the absurdity of contemporary human experience” (Alonso Cueto); and “a masterpiece”, in the words of Raúl Quinto, Spain’s 2024 National Book Award recipient.
The other two finalists for the Finestres Award are Argentinian writer César Aira—a frequent Nobel Prize nominee—and Guatemalan Eduardo Halfon, recent recipient of the Prix Médicis Étranger in France.
In other good news for Faverón, his first novel, (2014), is soon adding Russian to its list of translations to complement its English, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, and Turkish editions. His second novel, (2019), meanwhile, will appear in German translation in September, soon to be joined by a French edition. There are currently two offers on the table for an English translation in the United States.
