The book focuses on six artists sharing an apartment in Barcelona: Kiki, a twenty-three-year-old writer in the process of penning a pornographic novel about children; Ivan, a master’s student struggling to contain the violent impulses arising from his ambivalent relationship with his body; El Cuco, a hacker, video game designer, and member of the demoscene; and Irene, Emilio, and María Cecilia Terán, the enigmatic siblings whose motivation for and creation of the online horror game Nefando constitutes the axis upon which the novel revolves.
Featuring such a varied cast of characters, Nefando is profusely multivocal, alternating first-person accounts with interviews about the creation of the game with chapters of Kiki’s pornovela, its speakers moving between Mexican, Ecuadorian, or Catalan slang depending on their nationality. As it veers from prose to code, from community forums to hand-drawn images, the novel is continuously pushing the boundaries of language and form in its exploration of how to give speech to the unspeakable. It is a complex and profoundly affecting novel, one that perfectly displays the verve and technical proficiency that have made its author one of the most exciting Latin American writers working today.
