The Endless Week
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the 2023 winner of the Prix Goncourt for poetry comes a debut novel unlike any other, a lyrical anti-epic about the beauty, violence, trauma, and absurdity of the internet age.
Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim’s online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. It is a major work by one of the most fearlessly original writers of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The debut novel from Vazquez (The Hand of the Hand,a poetry collection) offers a stimulating and surreal exploration of thought patterns and internet addiction. Teen poet and vlogger Salim lives in public housing somewhere in France with his older sister, Sara; their cleanliness-obsessed father, who is unemployed; and their paralyzed grandmother. Salim has dropped out of school, much to the chagrin of a concerned social worker, and spends his days posting on social media and hanging out online with his lone friend, Jonathan, who's often high on pills. When his grandmother's nurses reveal that she will die without a blood transfusion, Salim begins searching for his long-absent mother, hoping her blood will heal his grandmother. Vazquez's novel is less concerned with plot than with getting inside each character's head, whether it's Jonathan as he texts ("Emojis bounced in Jonathan's hand. Their teeth were a straight, white line. If you looked at them long enough, you couldn't tell anymore if they were crying or laughing"), or Salim after he posts a poem ("Words were invented by the dead. All the words that travel through our throats have traveled through the throats of the dead"). Vazquez's commitment to swerving from one bizarre idea to another pays off.
