Some books are made of fucking—of cum and cumming, cocks, twats, and tongues, desires of all kinds. A la Gass, literature may arrive in different shades of blue: some the color of morning, an erection at sunrise, a shadow sexual tension undispersed by the night; others darkened to purple in their perversions, heavy, overwrought, fit to burst. For the prude, such books might be vulgar; the aesthete: garish; the reactionary: obscene; the fanatic: forbidden.

The state versus Molly Bloom deemed her language “unparlorlike.” In the UK, the Obscenity Act of 1959 sunk its teeth in Mr. Lawrence for a few “fucks” and “cunts.” Naturally, Nabokov, fine purveyor of pedophilia and incest, won his share of bans, for works that stand at the outer edge of linguistic profundity, and his public’s decency. Then, for a time, it seemed the dam had broken, as we moved into this century, unmoored by neo-liberalism, cavorting all we like between the pages, with naught but the odd local library acting the iron-clad censor.

So enter our fresh fallen world: in America, with 30% of our neighbors unmasked as bigots, white supremacists, and, for what seems like something of a first, self-styled vulgarians, untethered, finally, by a reality star’s innate vulgarities; and abroad, with all manner of buffoons, conmen, and plutocratic libertines taking the reins across every hemisphere, their pale faces framed, dead-eyed, on all of our screens, grinning through their malice. And, though the Left has historically held the mantle of obscenity in art and cultural life, that pride increasingly seems property of the Right, the alt-right, the fascists, who bear it happily against calls for decency, normality, and truth. Where once perversity was an aesthetic and political tool for critiquing power, for digging into its cracks to expose any rot, the obscene has now been subsumed by power itself. The emperor is naked, and his subjects adore it.

What’s to be done? Well, down with decency, I say, and bring back a version of truth-telling fiction that doubles down in its most vulgar strategies. And what better weapon to bring to this struggle against the arch xenophobes than books from outside our borders.

—a slim, strange 2016 novel by Spanish author Juan José Millás, and translated this year by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn for Bellevue Literary Press—traffics in a kind of perversity that flickers between comedy and domestic horror and, ultimately, economic alienation. The protagonist, Damián Lobo, recently fired from his job, spends all day imagining himself a celebrity on an extended TV interview. Early in the novel, the imaginary interviewer starts a line of questioning that brings Damián to the subject of his adopted Chinese step-sister, two years his senior. What starts as a sequence of questions lining up an adolescent crush in an unusual family arrangement, quickly drops into out-and-out incest. As the story progresses, Damián flees a petty theft by hiding in a wardrobe, which is in turn delivered to a family’s home. There, he becomes something like a phantom servant, cooking and cleaning and spying on the father’s hapless affair with a co-worker, until his phantomhood reaches a kind of violent apotheosis. It’s a novel where perversion leads to alienation in an absolute sense: from the bonds of a family via incest; from one’s own labor through capitalism’s rapacious march; and from personhood through a total disengagement with the world. In the end, all that’s left is a male gaze, obsessive, extreme, detached from life’s logic.

In —a 2015 novel by Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac, newly translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey for Soho Press—sex underlies the techno-evolution of capitalism, as a form of exchange, currency, and domination. A few apt scenes: the story opens on the Canary Islands in 1882; the intrepid explorer, Niklas Bruun, arrives to the hidden village of Mahan, where a fertility rite begins that will forever connect the Europeans “into the genetic history of the island in a torrent of semen and blood.” The novels second storyline introduces Cassio, a young hacker in the 80s, by-way-of the fuck that founded him. His mother, Sonia Liberman, has an affair with a Brazilian man, for whom she is exclusively a sexual object, and, naturally, a lack of protection and care leads us right to young Cassio, who grows into his own passages as an incel, for a time. In the final section, set in Bariloche, the now-techno-futurist hub of South America in 2024, a young female professional wears VR glasses and watches two Komodo dragons ravage a blonde woman in explicit detail, and masturbates. Each of the novel’s narrative strands uses sex as its own distinct critique of our ideological past, present, and future—be it colonialist, chauvinist, or techno-utopic. The sexual is always political, and this wonderful, maximalist little novel wields ribaldry like a gun aimed at capitalism’s amoral heart.

The conceptual artist Anicka Yi’s olfactory-based installation Washing Away of Wrongs (2014, created in conjunction with French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel) consists of two stainless steel dryer doors embedded into a gallery wall, each containing a motion-activated diffuser which, once the darkened portholes are unhinged, emits a lab-engineered puff meant to evoke a relationship’s nadir in terms both “abstract” and “representational,” respectively. When I initially encountered the work, however, it wasn’t by scent—or even sight—but by sound: a coterie of similarly-attired school children, on a field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art, were taking turns daring one another to get a whiff of the exhibit, scattering amid peals of tinny laughter and performative revulsion before being wrangled by their chaperones. The details of my own experience are unimportant (and too voluminous to unpack here). Instead, I’ll simply postulate that the act of opening a small doorway, shoving your oily visage into the recess, and inhaling an assortment of unsettling—possibly mind-altering—aromas is an ideal sensory analogue for reading a book. That is, the sort of book that alters your chemical composition in some imperceptible manner. The sort that infiltrates your physiological make-up, surreptitiously slipping a flounder into a ventilation duct so that weeks or months later you’re still puzzling over the source of that haunting smell. Here are five such books, ranked by the intensity of their odor profiles, from palatable to putrid.

by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd (New Directions)

The surface-level environs of the corporate city-state that sprawl across Oyamada’s English-language debut are inoffensive at a glance, redolent of clinical efficiency with accent notes emanating from the industrial laundries (starchy sweetness) and casual dining options (savory tang) dotting the terrain. Beneath the sterile exteriors lie dingy, intestinal workspaces where menial tasks, notably perpetual paper-shredding, are undertaken, creating a musty mélange of recycled oxygen, bored tedium, and wood pulp. It’s when the essence of reptilian rot begins to emanate from the crevices, while hulking rodentia patrol The Factory’s brackish outer edge, that things truly begin to smell funny.

by Bjørn Rasmussen, translated by Martin Aitken (Two Lines Press)

Rasmussen’s little obliteration wastes no time in expounding on the pungent pleasures of an illicit tryst, reminiscing over “breathing that special kind of air” from the very first page. Specifically, the intoxicating inhalant being referred to in this case is a lover’s asshole, but The Skin goes much deeper than that to assemble its heady stench. The manure and urine of the stables are ever-present, alongside the musky leather of saddles and riding crops, each element blurring seamlessly with an overall genital funk (ammonia and brine) radiating from the increasingly sadistic carnal excursions. Where the stink really sets in, though, is among the more cerebral concoctions—fear, arousal, and desperation are a potent mix.

by Pola Oloixarac, translated by Roy Kesey (Soho Press)

While much of Oloixarac’s latest trawls the global tech sector for content, no Soylent-saturated incubator could hope to stand up to Dark Constellations’ hallucinatory interstitial sections concerning a motley crew of 19th-century explorers. These assorted scientists find themselves ensnared in the odoriferous bouquet of a vast cavern, surrounded by fist-sized insects and translucent crustaceans, while gaseous pockets of volcanic runoff erupt in a “night perfumed with sulfur.” The exploration culminates in a prerequisite “torrent of blood and semen” as a marathon sex ritual, followed by the guzzling of albino butterfly innards, ensues. A primordial hothouse of herbaceous depravity—and I didn’t even mention the eventual depiction of VR-assisted lizard porn which, though presumably fragrance-free, should cause all your senses to recoil in unison.

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne (Grove Press)

A nearly unparalleled entrant into the pantheon of putrescence, Del Amo’s Animalia stinks to high heaven as a matter of course. There’s no way around it, a provincial pig farm proves to be fertile ground for a grim symphony of filth and viscera, expertly exuding the kind of pore-clogging reek that permeates down to the marrow. When it isn’t offal and entrails, the novel is locked in a constant battle with its main antagonist: shit. A veritable deluge of hog shit, glutting orifices and spreading disease, threatens ruin at every turn. In its scorched-earth crescendo, the sky is choked by a miasma of charred flesh and blanketed by toxic plumes of blackened smoke. A book this revolting is unlikely to be toppled from its position as preeminent nasal offender.

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano, translated by Thomas Bunstead (Coffee House Press)

Although,ĚýRodrigo Márquez Tizano may have a thing or two to say about it. If Animalia is Hell on Earth, then Jakarta is a pissed-off Tartarus covered in napalm. Rampant pestilence in the form of “poxes, choleras, fevers, and plagues” have ravaged the population, littering the landscape with decaying corpses, as an economy ruled by vice has taken hold of what’s left. Vermin ferry the sickness from one host to the next as mangy carrion canines scavenge the remains. Waste piles up in “mountains of garbage and meat.” Societal hygiene falls victim to government regulation. Jakarta is a bile-and-brimstone grotesquerie that should absolutely be sold with a warning label attached.

Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac
Translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey
216 pgs. | pb | 9781616959234 | $22.00

Reviewed by Grant Barber

Dark Constellations, the second novel in translation by the author of Savage Theories, continues the intriguing, complex narratives of science, technology, and searches for meaning and control in the personal and economic/political. Both novels jump around in time. Each epoch pushes boundaries of connectedness between the human and non-human, sometimes mystical, other times exploitive and weirdly, humorously absurd. Readers of Oloixarac’s novels seem to struggle with how to decide where to shelve these books: there are certainly elements of cyber-punk and science fiction. There is some Venn Diagram of relatedness in which a wider range of genres fits: Richard Power’s Plowing the Dark, ¶Ů±đł˘ľ±±ô±ô´Ç’s White Noise, ł§´Ç°ů´Ç°ěľ±˛Ô’s Ice; Bulgakov’s phantasmagoria and Nicola Barker’s disrupted narratives; Monty Python when the humor is biting, horrifying; and Andrea Barrett’s historical scientific concerns. And yet, we are not dealing with magical realism. Oloixarac is part of a grander movement of new Latinx writers, which includes the likes of El Salvadorian Castellano Moya of Dances with Snakes and Samanta Schweblin with Mouthful of Birds. Oloixarac’s writing is one of many styles of the new, but all these novels consist of ideas grounded in particulars, which is ultimately missing from so many dreary, derivative fictions of USA/British writers of manners and social convention.

Oloixarac’s writing is original, with unique preoccupations. Dark Constellations starts in the nineteenth century as European scientists seek an orchid’s pollen in the Canary Islands that is reported to break down barriers of human consciousness between people, but also human and non-human. Traveling into a cave system, scientists such as cartographer Torben Schats and insect merchant (?!) Diotimus Redbach find themselves overwhelmed by the hidden city of an indigenous tribe. They appear again later, but then we move on to Cassius, an student from Argentina studying computer coding and who later works at Stromatoliton, a company that seems to have a stake in the private, the public, the international, the dark web, and a future that breaks down divisions of species, people, corporations, and countries.

At the conclusion of his translation of Savage Theories, Roy Kesey writes a short afterword with observations on Oloixarac’s writing. He notes a sense of displacement, and already looks toward Dark Constellations, which joins the first “as every bit as rich and enfoldingly complex.” This is true on several levels of narrative structure and continuation of images and themes of which the keen reader might want to keep track. On a basic level of sentences (and the challenges the Spanish might have created for a translator), consider this concluding paragraph for one of the final chapters:

AilĂ­n laid her head to rest next to the computer. Suddenly, AilĂ­n and Noelia and Leni ceased to exist, and Cassio took up his lambskin jacket and patted Mossad, who meowed like a hoarse mockingbird. Cassio waved a liminal goodbye and was jettisoned out of the house. Violet glimmerings descended from the peak of the sky, covering everything, sliding down the side of the frozen mountain. Suddenly, his own trajectory painted itself sharply against the world.

A whole lot is going on just in those few sentences: acting and being acted on, unstable reality at least in perception, species confabulation, sky and earth features, allusion to the secretive political (Mossad) reduced to non-meaning, transcendence, specificity. If asked, could you demonstrate the act of “a liminal goodbye?”

We are in the near future. The women named in the above passage are the new “resistance,” literally painted as superficial as they try to disguise their faces from being scanned by public cameras, painting them with black and white triangle shapes. Cassio, who has been nurturing virus codes, has planted them throughout the world-wide web, one of the several trans-historical, trans-national, trans-personal constellations of the book’s title. The government and Cassio’s company have figured ways to capture the DNA of each person first via live samples, then exhumed corpses, and finally with monitors similar to public security cameras—Bionoses—which hoover up airborne DNA molecules from the general public. The revolutionary impulse of the population post-Argentinian dictatorship has devolved into the wearied but predictable co-opting of such projects—in which the government and corporations use scientific means for threatening but unclear gain.

I don’t think it is a spoiler to urge the reader to keep with the novel in order to reach a phantasmagoric, wonderfully absurd moment later on: a swarm of rats in a five-year cycle, triggered by the blooming of a specific plant that covers them in a neon-green dust. As the rats later die they first form copies of star constellations. According to one character, we can discern the really real by not looking at the stars/constellations, but at the black voids, the dark, titular constellations where there is no light. Head-scratching, profound sounding, a strung-together set of metaphors that might echo theoretical physics, nihilism, sure sounds like scientific deep thought or one of the earliest human attempts to figure out cause and effect: as above, so below, and vice versa. But these are the musings of a fellow looking at Day-Glo rats being exterminated while mysteriously forming constellation patterns, all brought about by an ability of humans to reach across the species barrier. A deep parallel exists between this descent down to the animalistic as Cassio reveals the technological nodes of the computer virus he has spent a lifetime surreptitiously disseminating, one that no one could debug or contain due to its complexity and reach.

In the end, Cassio comes to embody the worldwide reality, the how and the why waiting to be discovered by the reader who joins the journey of the novel. Another aspect that merits touching on is Oloixarac’s carna(l)tional, portrayal of the erotic. She writes about women’s reality, and differently from the more masculine (Updike? Roth?) build-up to a specific eruptive event, often described in cringe worthy language. In contrast, Oloixarac weaves frank, descriptive responses of female characters as incremental parts of life.

Oloixarac has an inventiveness, an imagination that stands apart from all those other (mostly male) writers I referenced at the start. She has control over images and ideas, which makes for little to no waste of words building up this world and its story. I don’t intend all of this to sound so dry, deadly serious. The writing has wit, playfulness, as Kesey also points out the “satiric key” that a reader needs keep in mind while tracking the jumps of time and place. We can look forward to more from this author, and one hopes the same translator, as Oloixarac’s third novel, Mona, has been recently published in Spanish.