Napalm in the Heart
A Novel
by Pol Guasch
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Pub Date Aug 13 2024 | Archive Date Sep 13 2024
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | FSG Originals
Description
"Pol Guasch must be one of the best young writers working today. This novel is entirely resolute and clear-hearted." —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X
"Guasch is a poet who is interested in image and tone, in texture and rhythmic variation. This mixture gives his innovative and original novel a mesmeric force, wonderfully captured in this translation." —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
Survival is a moral quandary in this jagged, otherworldly debut charting forbidden love during an apocalypse.
In a near future devastated by war and unspecified natural disaster, a young man and his mother cling to survival at the edge of a forest. Society is militarized and dangerous, with men with shaved heads patrolling the land as families are uprooted and nature is all but decimated. The young man spends his days helping his mother, who is traumatized from her experience working in the ominous Factory, and exchanging letters with his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the forest. It’s barely a life, but it’s life nonetheless.
After a brutal act of desperate violence and the arrival of armed men at their doorstep, the young man leaves his mother and finds Boris, who travels with him through the forest to the city. Escaping slavers and trekking through the empty landscape, the two find moments of intimacy despite their circumstances. But as their survival comes with increasingly violent demands, the young man is forced to confront whether, in his effort to stay alive, he’s become the very thing he’s fought to escape.
An award-winning breakout novel from a blazingly original Catalonian poet, Pol Guasch’s Napalm in the Heart is breathtaking in its beauty and devastation. Sparse, quick, and wrestling with big ideas, from the despoiling of the environment and totalitarianism to queerness and manhood, Guasch’s debut is an unrelenting and extraordinarily artful exploration of the moral murkiness of survival.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
"Pol Guasch must be one of the best young writers working today. This novel is entirely resolute and clear-hearted." —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X
"Pol Guasch creates an atmosphere that is menacing and powerfully dramatic, but he is also a poet who is interested in image and tone, in texture and rhythmic variation. This mixture gives his innovative and original novel a mesmeric force, wonderfully captured in this translation." —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
"Pol Guasch has written a punk novel whose title quotes Iggy Pop's 'heart full of napalm,' but there is no rock here and no animal roaming the streets. We instead find ourselves in a mysterious world of the future, or of the past. It is a world of desire and survival, in the aftermath of an apocalypse marked by different languages, obscure repression, and prose as mysterious as it is beautiful." —Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night
"Eerie and compelling, Napalm in the Heart retains its mystery without sacrificing any of its dramatic action. A gripping debut." —Nicole Flattery, author of Nothing Special
"Pol Guasch has crafted in his story a struggle for existence that never gives up on his characters' dreams. Napalm in the Heart challenges the boundaries between delicacy and brutality, creating an unforgettable novel in the process." —Alejandro Zambra, author of Chilean Poet
"What is the language of love? What is the grammar of survival? Pol Guasch sketches a beautiful response to these urgent questions, weaving a powerful tale of desire and resistance in which an old world is mourned and a new world is imagined. Reading this book is like traversing a dark forest and spotting, when night seemed to devour it all, the light of the fireflies as the glimmer of hope. A beautiful tale of survival, love and resistance." —Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral
"Napalm in the Heart is a lyrical gut-punch of a novel about one man’s search for purpose at the bitter end of a bitterer world. As I followed the unnamed narrator’s journey across post-apocalyptic ruins and militarized borders—meeting his forbidden lover, mourning the dead, and witnessing his increasingly brutal acts of violence—I came to see anew the horror of our own political present. In this book, Pol Guasch has given us a ruthless and appropriately deranged reminder to fight." —Maggie Millner, author of Couplets
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374612955 |
| PRICE | $18.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 256 |
