Nochita
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- 16,99 €
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- 16,99 €
Publisher Description
A poetic debut novel, formally experimental, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny and brutally real. Nochita is tender, fierce, and unforgettable.
Daughter to a divorced new age guru, Nochita wanders through the cracks of California's counter-culture, half feral child, half absurdist prophet. When tragedy strikes she is sent to live with her father, a working-class cowboy with a fragile grasp on sobriety and a dangerously mean fiancée. Stuck with adults chillingly unable to care for her, Nochita takes to the streets, a runaway with nothing to run from, driven forward by desperation, hope, and an irrepressible wonder.
Nochita is a poetic novel dazzling in its detail, stylistically daring, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny, and brutally real. At its heart is the singular voice of Nochita, tender and fierce, alone and alive and utterly unforgettable.
Praise for Nochita:
"Nochita shimmers with humor and delight, she burns with stark raving intelligence."—Mary Gaitskill
"In Nochita, Dia Felix builds an extraordinarily rich and inventive language to carry the kaleidoscopic point of view of her young protagonist. What a pleasure to open a book and find such exuberant and committed artistry. A stunning debut."—Janet Fitch
"There is a way some writers say hello on the first page that gets me excited to be in their conversation. Nochita has it with teeth!! I love this book and the weird strong eye it has on the world, melting clothes off bodies with a crème brulée torch. Nochita is quite the dance to read through, kind of like shaking a bad morning off and realizing you really love this world. Makes me smile, like Dia Felix writes, 'I think I can latch on to this machine now.' BUY THIS BOOK, don’t just stand there reading my fucking blurb!!"— CAConrad
"In the vein of extra-sensitive displaced daughters à la White Oleander, with the crystallized hyper-perception at the center of The Bluest Eye, Nochita is singular, resonant—her pictures get under your skin and stay there; more than lines embedded, here are things you've seen before, numbed and fallen away with the process of becoming adult. Against writers who make a phalanx of accuracy and precision, Felix delivers synesthetic gut-sense in a visual pile-on that picks up and turns over your sense of being human, dirt and M&Ms and kundalini shakti, written by a gifted seer whose inner child is alive and screaming … Nochita brings it down to the roots."—Mila Jaroniec
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filmmaker Felix's debut novel explores the life of a young woman, Notchita or Chita, whose pleasant but unconventional childhood is disrupted by the death of her cool, hippie "guru" mother. When Nochita goes to live with her alcoholic father Jorge and her overly sensitive stepmother Beverly, she gains a better understanding of his experiences in the Vietnam War, until his post-traumatic stress disorder forces Nochita to try to live on her own. Felix peppers the book with several interesting fragments Nochita has a pet pig, meets outsiders like herself, experiments with drugs, makes discoveries about her sexuality, finds unusual employment as a cigarette girl, and learns to cope with death. There are also some darkly funny moments but ultimately the book seems invested with showing us the strange and dazzling people in Nochita's life rather than giving us time to understand and experience these characters. As a result, there is no emotional pay-off at the end. Even the book's central tensions Nochita's conflicted longings (she desires normalcy yet she constantly seeks adventure) aren't fully explored.
