Friday, April 22, 2011

No Word from Gurb by Eduardo Mendoza

No Word from Gurb is a grotesque story of two aliens in a form of pure intelligence who come to Earth in a mission of exploring the life of creatures living here - humans. They land in Barcelona and soon one of the aliens - Gurb disappears. The other one gets a human form and in the meantime of looking for his friend, lives among people, whose behaviour, habits and being in general finds weird and irrational. He gets involved in many funny, sometimes absurd situations.

My impression of the book is mixed. There were couple of funny moments and I had to smile couple of times when a place I've been to or food I've tried was mentioned. The alien turned out to be a great fan of churros which I totally love:9 The book captures well the atmosphere of the city. But it wasn't as funny as the recommendations stated or maybe it's just not my sence of humor (I must admit I'm not a fan of grotesque) as some situations seemed too absurd or unnecessary. Although I liked the general idea of the story it didn't arouse an excitement in me. It was okay but not a revelation.

 

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churros <3

5 comments:

  1. churros, i never heard about it before :)

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  2. Oh I love them, but I prefer churros with chocolate inside, did you ever tried with something inside? They are very typical here, we easily find them in cars that sells stuff in the parties of villages or parties were a great number of population gathers to celebrate something, the most famous are "farturas" which are similar to churros, but more twisted and with sugar around

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  3. Churros with chocolate inside? I'm comming to Portugal!:P :9 I just ate those in the photo. But there were some big ones with some cream inside but I don't like cream.

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  4. Oh, I'd love those with cream ^0^ I might eat some soon because we're about to book tickets to Girona ^.^ YAY! As for the book... I like reading weird stuff, I like books to make a lot of sense or no sense at all... so I have my problems with grotesque and satire... either the author meets your demands or he does not... I'm struggling with a book that is said to be some kinda satire, but I prefer satirical sketches than something like 600 pages @.@

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  5. There are with cream, chocolate, some kind of strawberry jam... the chocolate ones are the best!

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