Evolution, ethnography, epidemics—this is the soup from which Dengue Boy, a brilliantly unusual new novel by the Argentine writer Michel Nieva, emerges. The eponymous Dengue Boy is a mosquito–human hybrid who is likely to be an experiment, a genetic mutant, or the results of some horrible company crime. He is likely to be all three without delay. In any case, it doesn’t matter a lot to the monstrous creature, whom we discover dwelling in 2272 in what stays of Argentina after the melting of the Antarctic ice cap has rendered many of the world both underwater or uninhabitably sizzling.
Sizzling sufficient to roast a turkey in 20 minutes flat at what passes for room temperature in California. The “Argentine Caribbean,” in the meantime, stays a relatively balmy year-round common of 140 levels Fahrenheit (60 levels Celsius). It’s little shock, then, that builders have been busy terraforming the Antarctic Caribbean, engineering entire biomes to re-create little slices of Earth on, uh, Earth. For a flat charge, shoppers can select packages of 5, 10, or 20 species to populate their biome en masse. Who cares about one Amazon rainforest when you can also make 30?
Humanity is hanging on, roughly, like a bug on the underside of a rock. On the opposite facet of the rock are the privileged youngsters of the viroeconomy (extra on that later). These youngsters plug themselves into digital headsets and immerse themselves in conquest fantasies like the sport Christians v Indians 2. One character fantasizes about getting maintain of sheepies: near-sentient fleshlights with countless orifices to discover. Some have entire cabinets filled with the issues.
I point out the sheepies to not be prurient however as a result of they get one thing throughout concerning the strangeness of Dengue Boy. It’s all very fleshy. Heads splitting, tentacles plunging, innards changing into outards—the e-book is a riot of bodily sensations. One may name the e-book “local weather fiction,” in that it’s set in a world clearly within the demise spiral of local weather disaster, however this may undersell the novel’s heady weirdness, which skips throughout economics, sexuality, biology, and temporality with out ever actually drawing breath.
Any novel during which the protagonist finds themselves in an insect physique attracts the inevitable comparability to The Metamorphosis. The e-book’s inside flap describes Dengue Boy as an “extraordinary, Kafkaesque portrait of a demented future.” However in Kafka’s novella, Gregor Samsa wakes as much as discover himself remodeled right into a monstrous bug; his immense ache comes from his data of what he as soon as was and the life he wish to crawl again to.
Dengue Boy was all the time Dengue Boy. He has no transformation with which he should come to phrases. It’s the exterior world that should be dropped at know him. “The place his mom would have appreciated to see pudgy arms, his wings sprouted out, their nerve endings just like the varicose veins of a disgusting previous man, and the place his mom would have appreciated to listen to chuckles and lovely yelps, there was solely a continuing, maddening buzz that will drive even essentially the most tranquil soul to despair.”
In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s transformation is a one-way avenue. However Dengue Boy will undergo a whirlwind of adjustments, like evolution working in fast-forward, till it’s not clear precisely the place time or truth or fiction start or finish.
In Dengue Boy the billionaire class aren’t tech bros, however speculators on the so-called viroeconomy, who guess on which illness is about to take off after which make a killing stockpiling would-be cures. Together with the builders who construct resorts on the bottom ceded by retreating ice caps, they’re the one actual winners within the catastrophe financial system. It takes a sure sort of particular person to view a panorama riven by destruction and see a chance for luxurious condos.
Which all sounds a bit miserable, besides Nieva’s visceral, surreal prose—translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery—is something however. This can be a e-book that takes the terrible strangeness of the world and explodes it into one thing that’s each horrible and not possible to look away from. It jogged my memory of the ultimate scene of the film Pearl, during which Mia Goth faces the digicam with a rictus grin that drags on and on, till she is sobbing, slowly unraveling right into a grimace of deep despair whereas the top credit play out.
Dengue Boy performs this trick in reverse. It’s a grimace that turns into a smile. It’s a digicam shot that spins round so many instances that you simply’re undecided if it’s the director or the actor you’re taking a look at, and in any case you are feeling queasy or are you simply giddy with pleasure?
It’s weirdness sliced up, spun in a salad spinner, and served with some indescribable gunk on high. It’s scrumptious, for those who can abdomen it.
