thumbs down for having a reactionary take on the french revolution, also. there are a couple of moments of baroque grotesqueness that i really liked, but unfortunately these are few and far between. unfortunately it doesn't really live up to its ambitions - there's a great deal of exposition of 18th century intellectual ideas but this mostly comes across as dry info dumps rather than anything more complex, and because it's so focused on ideas the characters aren't as well drawn as they could be either.
this is a good concept and structurally it's quite ambitious, going off into digressions when new characters are introduced, and once or twice doing this in a nested fashion, with a digression within a digression. each chapter is centred around a major 18th century figure, who the main character encounters at different times in his life, and the story mostly grow out of his intellectual and social relationships with these various figures. it is about a spanish aristocrat in 18th century france, with wideranging intellectual interests, who has visions of the future whenever he reaches orgasm. I picked this up blind at a book sale because it's by a mexican writer i hadn't previously heard of, it looked dense and erudite, and it's translated by helen lane who put a lot of extremely good spanish language books into english.
In his prodigious first novel, Francisco Rebolledo brings to life a heady mix of eighteenth-century politics, desire, philosophy, science, and art, showing us in this vanished world, with all its contradictions and sorrows, a troubled counterpart to our own. But it is his love for a beautiful young widow from Mexico that transforms him and ultimately moves Rasero toward the wisdom he has long sought. As he tries to reconcile the sanguine promises of the Enlightenment with the chilling prophecies of his visions, he comes to know virtually every important figure of his time: Diderot, Voltaire, Madame de Pompadour, Boucher, Lavoisier, the young Mozart, Hume, Rousseau, Robespierre, and Goya. He is also orgasmically clairvoyant, given at the moment of carnal release to apocalyptic visions of a world that he comes to recognize as the future. He is a peculiar hero-bald since birth, intellectually and sexually precocious as a child, as a man passionate and warmhearted. Fausto Rasero, a young Spanish nobleman, settles in Paris, the hub of European intellectual life in the eighteenth century.
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