Let No One Sleep
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An odyssey of operatic proportions, featuring an obsession-fueled taxi driver
After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor.
Let No One Sleep is a delirious novel in which the mundane and extraordinary collide, art revives and devastates, and identity is unhinged by the treacherous forces of contemporary society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Madrid woman hunts the object of her obsession in the wildly carnal latest from Spanish writer Millás (From the Shadows). Lucia, having just been fired from her computer programmer job, is enchanted by the opera music emanating from a vent in her apartment, and learns it's coming from a handsome neighbor's apartment. A surreal motif surfaces: like many characters, including Lucia's deceased mother, the man has a birdlike appearance. After he moves out, she learn he is Braulio Botas, an actor and writer of experimental theater. Now a taxi driver, Lucia spends her days and nights searching for Botas, befriending some fares and sleeping with others. One nighttime passenger is her former boss, whose drunkenness she exploits by depositing him at the feet of vagrants. When she learns he was murdered where she left him, an air of paranoia sets in. Inspired by Puccini's Turandot, the opera Lucia heard Botas playing, Lucia imagines she is driving the streets of Beijing and mentally transposes a map of that city onto Madrid. It's here that Millás shines the most. "If I were your wife," Lucia tells one befuddled fare, "I'd have given you a slap with those hands she's got at the end of her short arms." Her ultimate meeting with Botas feels darkly inevitable, culminating in a phantasmagoric climax involving her worst fears and the manifestation of her own birdlike nature. Everything impresses in this darkly iridescent, utterly captivating flight.
