Wonderful World
Javier Calvo’s excellent novel Wonderful World would likely never have appeared on my radar screen had it not been in my Big Box of Awesome. Thanks again, Madeline Donahue of Strand Books.
Wonderful World is definitely ironically titled. The world within its pages is a dark place, populated by thieves, con men, mobsters, along with the just generally unhappy. Lucas Girault is among the melancholy. His father was a stranger. The elder Girault, an antiques dealer and possible gangster, died under mysterious circumstances after being released from jail when Lucas was young. His mother hates him completely and is seeking to wrestle control of his portion of the antiques empire through any means necessary. Lucas’s best friend is one his neighbors, a disturbed 12-year old girl who is a self-declared expert on the works of Stephen King.
Lucas decides to assert himself by defying his mother and hanging on to his control of the family business. Breaking free from her control, he decides to find out what happened to his father by choosing to become a bit of a gangster himself. He joins one of his father’s former associates in a shadowy organization known as Down with the Sun Society, who treats him like a long lost son. The base of their operations is in a fantastically exorbitant strip club called The Dark Side of the Moon.
Darkness is a recurring motif in the novel. In addition to the Down with the Sun Society and the works of Pink Floyd (featured prominently in the organization’s activities), the imagery of literally turning away from light is frequently invoked. A painting at the center of an art heist features a dark sun bearing down on a humanity that appears to be descending into a hell on earth (like the cover).
Wonderful World is a post-modern mash up. It is thriller of sorts, but it subverts that genre with regularity. Excerpts of the (fictional) new Stephen King novel are interspersed throughout the novel. Popular culture is distorted throughout by observers who live outside of the culture in question. A Spanish woman delivers a hilarious take on the final season of Friends, the only season she has watched on DVD. A dread-locked Russian mobster wants desperately to escape to Jamaica to become a Rastafarian, even though most of what he thinks he knows about the religion, Bob Marley, and Jamaica are dead wrong. Donald Duck is referenced in perhaps the most sinister way possible.
It is a “big” novel, in size, ambition, ideas, and scope. Wonderful World is a translated novel (from Spanish), which is perennially on my list of the kinds of books that I am going to read more of “next year.” The “foreignness” of the novel kept me continually off balance as a reader, which is place I am happy to be. Wonderful World is surely not everyone’s cup of tea. Yet, the fact that I came to read the book almost by accident seems like the perfect way to encounter this particular novel.
October 6, 2009 8:20 am 
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