Tears of the Trufflepig
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Average rating4.5
One of Lit Hub and The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 and one of Buzzfeed and Tor.com's Books to Read This Spring “Funny, futuristic, phenomenal, Fernando A. Flores is from another galaxy. Fasten your seat belt. You are in for a stupendous ride.” —Sandra Cisneros A parallel universe. South Texas. Narcotics are legal and there’s a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals—species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life starts to get complicated when the swashbuckling investigative journalist Paco Herbert invites him to come to an illegal underground dinner serving filtered animals. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous, surreal, psychedelic journey, where he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers. Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores’s debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, a dire warning against the one percent’s determination to dictate society’s decline, and a nuanced investigation of loss. It’s also the perfect introduction for Flores: a wonderfully weird, staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction, and a mythmaker of the highest order.
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This is a novel of speculative fiction that takes places at the Texas border in an alternate reality where drugs are legal and the new contraband is ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered (resurrected) animals. The main character, Bellacosa, works as a glorified repo man and, when he befriends a reporter named Paco, is introduced to this underground world of corruption and bizarre animal resurrections for the filthy rich to enjoy. The titular Trufflepig is the most prized of the filtered beasts, as it never existed before; it's a mythical creature like a unicorn brought to life.
So, as you can probably guess, this is a very strange novel. And it gets even weirder.
Flores' strengths as a writer are his painterly metaphors and similes as well as his ability to set a scene. The towns near the border are familiar in these pages to those of us who live in Texas, but there is also a bleakness and the oh-so-slight differences from reality that make the “parallel universe” concept conceivable. Flores has a poet's eye when describing food or the nostalgic pangs of Bellacosa's past.
Flores' weakness in this novel is the dialogue, which is mostly stilted and expository, rather than conversational and real. The only scene with authentic dialogue was the fever dream where Bellacosa revisits long-lost family members. But the rest of the characters that interact with Bellcosa–for the most part–spew long-winded soliloquies while he silently listens, even the waitresses in the diners have long, mostly one-sided conversations. This was a huge distraction from an otherwise well-written novel.
As strange as the story was, I did find myself ruminating on this book a while after finishing it, and I admired Flores' ability to poetically describe the region, particularly the cuisine. By the time Bellacosa visits his family members in the aforementioned fever dream, that bit of humanity was injected a little too late for me as I struggled to relate with Bellacosa's plight. The Trufflepig was a fitting companion for Bellacosa as it reconnected him to what he loved most: his family. Their exit together was a plausible end to this strange journey.
