CATHERINE STEEL relishes a compelling novel about Augustus’s right hand man, but misses the politics, the cultural shifts, and more detail about his restoration of Rome
Nocilla Lab
by Agustin Fernandez Mallo
(Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99)
HOW to create a literature out of the detritus of consumer culture? That’s the task Agustin Fernandez Mallo sets himself in Nocilla Lab, the concluding volume of a trilogy published in Spain between 2006 and 2009, which seeks to create a poetics fit for the late capitalist epoch.
Unlike the previous volumes, which sutured quotations of theoretical physics and Hollywood films with fictional narrative strands into a peculiar cumulative collage, this concluding work is one of “autofiction” that blends memoir and fiction in detailing the origins myth of what Mallo calls “The Project.”
Nothing, says ANDY HEDGECOCK, can rescue this undistinguished amalgam of ponderous melodrama and shallow philosophical speculation
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a pessimistic novel in which Hitler is removed from history, to little effect
FIONA O’CONNOR questions the achievement of this year’s Orwell prize winner for political fiction
KEVIN DONNELLY accepts the invitation to think speculatively in contemplation of representations of people of African descent in our cultural heritage



