Let No One Sleep

Starred review from June 27, 2022
A Madrid woman hunts the object of her obsession in the wildly carnal latest from Spanish writer Millás (From the Shadows). Lucia, having just been fired from her computer programmer job, is enchanted by the opera music emanating from a vent in her apartment, and learns it’s coming from a handsome neighbor’s apartment. A surreal motif surfaces: like many characters, including Lucia’s deceased mother, the man has a birdlike appearance. After he moves out, she learn he is Braulio Botas, an actor and writer of experimental theater. Now a taxi driver, Lucia spends her days and nights searching for Botas, befriending some fares and sleeping with others. One nighttime passenger is her former boss, whose drunkenness she exploits by depositing him at the feet of vagrants. When she learns he was murdered where she left him, an air of paranoia sets in. Inspired by Puccini’s Turandot, the opera Lucia heard Botas playing, Lucia imagines she is driving the streets of Beijing and mentally transposes a map of that city onto Madrid. It’s here that Millás shines the most. “If I were your wife,” Lucia tells one befuddled fare, “I’d have given you a slap with those hands she’s got at the end of her short arms.” Her ultimate meeting with Botas feels darkly inevitable, culminating in a phantasmagoric climax involving her worst fears and the manifestation of her own birdlike nature. Everything impresses in this darkly iridescent, utterly captivating flight. Agent: María Lynch, Casanovas & Lynch Literary.

July 1, 2022

In this latest from multiple-award-winning Spanish novelist Mill�s (From the Shadows), Luc�a decides to become a taxi driver after losing her job as a computer programmer. Her conversations with her passengers, a cross section of humanity that includes theater producer Roberta and journalist Ricardo, plus a cancer patient, a blind man, and even her former boss, form the gist of the book's first part. Luc�a is obsessed with reconnecting with Braulio, a former actor and neighbor she only briefly met, and also with Puccini's Turandot, whose famous aria "Nessun dorma" (the "let no one sleep" of the title) recurs throughout the novel. In her gradual slide into a world of fantasy, Luc�a pictures herself as a bird-woman and as Princess Turandot driving through Beijing, rather than Madrid. In the book's second part, things turn ugly when Roberta, Ricardo, and Braulio abuse her confidences by making them fodder for a play, Lucia takes revenge on them in a macabre and disturbing ending. VERDICT Readers are forced to suspend disbelief, as they, like the protagonist, are drawn into Luc�a's alternate world and are at times unsure which one is veridical. Mill�s's character portrayals, especially of Luc�a, are masterly, but the disjointed episodic narration and extraneous elements leave a loose end or two. A disquieting fantasy of the Kafkian variety that's both unsettling and absurd.--Lawrence Olszewski

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2022
A woman's change in careers leads to a bizarre series of obsessions. The protagonist of Mill�s' novel wrangles with driving a taxi, the nature of desire, and the opera Turandot. That would be Luc�a, who begins the book working in an office but soon takes a test to become a taxi driver and embraces her new line of work--and occasionally has assignations with her passengers. That summary doesn't entirely convey how strange this novel can get, however. Luc�a views a number of the people she encounters as bird people, noting of one man that "​​his nose was an eagle's beak." Later, she asks one of her passengers if he's "never cheated on [his] wife with a Mama Bird before?" The other surreal strand in this book is Luc�a's obsession with Turandot, a Puccini opera about a Chinese princess whose suitors face the prospect of death while attempting to win her hand. Occasionally, Luc�a blurs the lines between herself and the fictional character, donning makeup and telling one passenger, "I'm a Chinese princess. Haven't you looked at my eyes? My name's Turandot." Luc�a has a fascination with an actor named Braulio Botas, who also has an interest in the overlap of life and art; late in the book, he tells her, "I've been looking for a door that connects with reality, and you opened that door with the story of your life." It's heady stuff which takes a deeply visceral turn at novel's end. It doesn't always click perfectly--and there are fascinating implications of its premise that the novel doesn't address--but the bizarre assemblage of elements Mill�s brings together here makes for a memorable read. A strange and often transgressive exploration of art and intimacy.

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