Hallucinations

“If God were here he would have gone mad”

4/5⭐

Magical realism to the fullest extent.

It’s the story of the real man, Friar Servando, who lived from 1765-1827, but told in a series of almost nonsensical scenes that resemble a dream more than they do a history.

Rats will speak, trees will run, and people will fly, but other times the scenes are grounded in a prison cell and the wandering mind of the unfortunate friar.

It’s like a person telling you about their life, but through, as the name suggests, hallucinations. It is impossible to tell what is real and what is imagined in the mind of the friar. Scenes will sometimes contradict each other or outright deny what just happened.

The point of view will switch from first to third to even second from one section to the next. Sometimes the friar is telling his own story, sometimes he is remembering it in hindsight, other times we are the friar.

It is funny and strange and horribly sad all at once. It reveals the stupidity of dogmatism, but also the power of even the smallest sliver of hope and the will to live.

I have attempted to read other books that try to do this sort of thing (Infinite Jest) and I have given up, frustrated by the lack of clarity, but somehow this book maintains a hallucinogenic state while still making it relatively easy to follow the overarching journey of the friar.

Once you get used to the style, it becomes a lot of fun and surprisingly insightful. It reminded me at times of Slaughterhouse-Five.

It is less concerned with that happened to the friar, and more concerned with how we process our life and what our experiences feel like. If that means having the main character roll down a mountain in a massive ball of chains, destroying a castle in the process, then so be it.

Underline-worthy quotes:

“Maybe you knew the evil didn’t lie in the moment begging to be enjoyed but in the slavery that would come of having given in to it, the dependency for life.”