human-machine hybrid that can manipu-
late wireless signals and galvanize the other
workers to rise up against the oppressive
Silicon Isle natives.
This superbly translated novel about
the perils of unchecked, rampant globaliza-
tion and technology will give Chen Qiufan
the attention he deserves in America and
around the world.
Rachel S. Cordasco
Madison, Wisconsin
Christine Wunnicke
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura
Trans. Philip Boehm. New York. New
Directions. 2019. 161 pages.
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura feels like a min-
iature voyage around the world and into the
not-so-distant past. We travel with Dr. Shi-
mamura from the rural Japanese provinces
to the great European cities at the end of
the nineteenth century. Thanks to Christine
Wunnicke’s minutely detailed writing, elo-
quently reflected in Philip Boehm’s transla-
tion from the German, the atmosphere of
the book envelops you and takes you along
on this strange journey.
The novel starts almost at the end of
the story. Dr. Shimamura is living out his
retirement in a house he shares with four
women: his wife, her mother, his own moth-
er, and a maid, about whom nobody quite
remembers whether she once worked at Dr.
Shimamura’s psychiatric hospital or was his
patient there. This uncertainty and forget-
ting forms the background music to this
mystical tale.
Dr. Shimamura wants to remember the
circumstances surrounding an event early
on in his career when he was sent to the
countryside to exorcise the mythical fox
illness in “hysterical” women. During this
assignment his young assistant went miss-
ing, presumed dead. However, over time Dr.
Shimamura’s memory has been tampered
with and altered: through his mother writ-
ing his biography, which he reads in secret;
through his wife surreptitiously replacing
his hidden souvenirs when they become
worn from too much handling; and even
through the therapy and hypnosis treatment
he received from psychiatric colleagues
when in Europe. Without being able to rely
on his memory, he cannot discover what
became of his young assistant, but ultimate-
ly this desire to know what happened gives
him a reason to live despite his ill health.
Wunnicke’s deftly drawn vignettes of
Dr. Shimamura’s life provide tantalizing
glimpses into the manifestations of East-
ern and Western psychiatry at the turn of
the last century as well as a mystery that is
slowly revealed throughout this short but
moreish book.
Wunnicke has won several awards in
her native Germany. The Fox and Dr. Shi-
mamura was longlisted for the Deutscher
Buchpreis in 2015. Philip Boehm is a cel-
ebrated German- and Polish-to-English
translator.
Catherine Venner
Durham, UKBooks in Review
Agustín Fernández Mallo
The Nocilla TrilogyTrans. Thomas Bunstead. New York.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019.
527 pages.In 2001’s Reality Hunger, David Shields
mashed together quotes in a collage
manifesto that praised antinarrative ten-
dencies, antigenre hybrids, and a future
literature without regard for such outdat-
ed categories as “fiction” and “nonfiction.”
This type of experimentation had
its progenitors in the sampling culture
of hip-hop, and what Shields argued
for was a similar sharing, borrowing,
and stealing of samples in the interest
of creating something new. The Nocilla
Tr i l o g y, by Agustín Fernández Mallo
(Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, and
Nocilla Lab), follows a similar, imagi-
native playfulness in its construction,
in which “the reader will have come
across certain real, public biographies
that deviate from their original state, as
well as fictitious biographies that con-
verge with the sources of other, real
ones, all coming together to form [this]
‘docu-fiction.’”
Plot-wise, Nocilla is less concerned
with straightforward narrative than
it is with a kind of shotgun blast of
fragments about the environment and
architecture and skin and weather. The
flash pieces orbit an invisible sun that is
occasionally made visible by a central
object, such as a tree with thousands
of shoes dangling in its branches, or a
small capsule of radioactivity hidden
in the overstuffed stomachs of eastern
European refugees. All throughout the
text there is the lingering specter of
entropy, of bodies deteriorating, of light
not being able to reach into the darkest
parts of us (not a metaphor, but also
definitely a metaphor).AGUSTÍN FERNÁNDEZ MALLO96 W LT SUMMER 2019