Not to be a simp, but I’ll read anything that Catherine Lacey (Biography of X, Pew) recommends. If she says Pol Cuasch is “one of the best young writers working today,” then I believe her! Napalm is about a war-torn, apocalyptic near future. The story follows a young man living with his traumatized mother who must leave home and trek into danger to find his lover. I’m not always a fan of apocalypse lit, but I love queer stories and messy mother stories and this book is both so I’m about it. Sometimes you need a little emotional devastation, as a treat.

Thought this was a perfectly solid work of Queer fiction with a lot of relatable elements, but I wish it had let the reader in a little more

Napalm in the Heart is a strange, beguiling novel – Pol Guasch is a poet, and the novel is full of stylistic flourishes, including intimate letters between the narrator and his lover, Boris, in the first part, and long passages of poetry disguised as a letter from his mother in the second part. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, where a cataclysmic event, perhaps triggered at the Factory where his mother worked and where sinister things are suggested but never made explicit, has shaken the area.

The writing is startlingly beautiful and brutal in turn. I especially admired Guasch’s ability to match the temperature of his writing to the bleakness of the world outside and the interior feelings of the narrator – the writing is warm and inviting when he is writing to Boris, cold and distant when he is narrating their harrowing drive. Overall, there is an emotional detachment that made the novel difficult to get into, perhaps to echo the devastation of the land and its people.

The novel is rife with references to language – speaking one language and not another, not the one of the army men and slavers, encountering a group that speaks your language after a long escape. I read it as a clear parable for the Catalan language, split between Catalonia and the southern region in France and juxtaposed against Spanish, and Guasch’s focus on language for a novel written in Catalan felt appropriate and self-aware without being overly didactic.

Nations at war often don't feature the impacted civilians and are unaware of what is happening. IT's frightening and alienating. The young man documents his life through letters to his boyfriend, Boris. When his mother tries to get a lover, who is one of the soldiers occupying their area, he tricks him, ties him up, and lets him starve to death to be devoured by animals. A metaphor for the life of the refugee, freed from that trap.

It is a sprawling and poetic story about war and its impacts. We don't see it as the reader, but we know it is there. We are just as clueless as refugees.

Favorite Passage:
I always reminded myself that he was profoundly nostalgic, deep down, because he was missing something he’d never had, and that’s the worst nostalgia you can have.

Poets writing novels is a bit of hit and miss for me. In this case, there was - as other reviewers have remarked - too little to hold on to. Guasch will give you sparse information and put a lot of poetry around it, much of which went over my head, but which also, taken together, created a unique and hopeless atmosphere.

“memories are lonely bullets in the night⁣
but they can also be light against the shadows”⁣
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“One of those peripheral relationships that only serve to kill time, and over time kills your life, because it makes your loneliness and frustration grow even more.”⁣
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From: 𝘕𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘭𝘮 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 by Pol Guasch, translated by Mara Faye Lethem⁣
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This is such an impressive debut. ⁣
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The eerie, atmospheric dystopian world of an unnamed occupied country after some kind of apocalypse is bleak, yet so vivid. This book felt like a lesson in show-don’t-tell. This is how it’s done. You only find out certain details when Guasch wants you to and still it feels accidental. This creates the perfect sense of doom and intrigue needed to uphold the suspense through most of the novel. Not a word too much, not a flourish felt overdone. ⁣
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The story is carefully stitched together with pieces of memoir and letters and poetry. I was especially moved by the mother’s letter and finding out more about her life (I feel like that could be a whole novel by itself 🥰). ⁣
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I knew almost nothing of the story when I started reading it (I feel like I say that all the time; but what can I say I love going into books blind 🤷🏼‍♀️) and I loved that experience, so I am deliberately not telling much about what happens 😇⁣
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Is this on your radar?! It should be! ⁣
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Thank you @fsg and @netgalley for the eARC!⁣
📚📖💙⁣⁣⁣
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#literaryfiction #bookstack #booklovers #shelfie #litfic #readingupdate #alwaysreading #bookworm #bookstagram #instareading #instabooks #bookblog #whatiread #readingaddict #fortheloveofreading #booknerd #fortheloveofbooks #bookish #allaboutthebooks #napalmintheheart #polguasch

As a lover of both translated, global literature and dystopian novels, I thoroughly enjoyed the marrying of both genres in this tenebrous view of the future that explores important moral and human questions. Guasch has created a world that is foreboding and filled with a constant threat of annihilation and suffering on the margins. The atmosphere that Guasch creates reminds me of “The End of Us,” “Dark,” and “The Road”—a space to contemplate how our humanity will iterate itself when it is pressed to the limit.

I liked this novel. I thought the writing was very lyrical and poetic, which made it beautiful at times amid the setting of brutality and apocalypse. However, I did have a hard time attaching myself to the story and characters like I wanted to… I felt like I only got the essence of the story because it was so stylistically focused. Something didn’t connect fully but I still found it enjoyable and I’m glad I read it.

Lyrical and mysterious, NAPALM IN THE HEART paints a reactionary portrait of a forbidden love against an apocalyptic landscape.

The premise was compelling and the language spare but carefully crafted. I appreciated the restrained tone that allows the reader to draw their own conclusions as it provides vignettes to piece together. I like that in this way, it avoided many tropes of dystopian/apocalyptic fiction and instead followed a similar approach to books like I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN.

The strengths were in the lasting chilling imagery — such as the mother’s body in the car. Seeing glimpses into these disturbing circumstances provided a large impact in a small amount of pages.

Although in many ways this sparseness was a strength and allowed the reader to focus on the intimate character developments, I also feel it was a weakness in some ways. In order to feel truly invested in this intimate relationship at the end of the world, I felt like I needed a little more context to feel like there were stakes as a reader. The sparing glimpses into this world made it hard to feel immersed, and therefore, stifled my emotional investment in the turbulent ending of this relationship — which is a shame, because it seemed to be the central narrative.

Following the aftermath of an unknown apocalypse/pandemic/military siege, a man/boy lives with his mother in a rural house. He sends letters to his love, Boris, who he plans to runaway with.

While poetic and intimately written, I felt this book was too vague for me. It felt fleeting and ungrounded in an intentional way that I just didn't enjoy. I wanted more information and variety throughout the entire plot of the book. I was waiting for answers that I would never get, as that wasn't the intention of the book. While the book is not plot driven, it seemed unnecessary and confusing to incorporate a nonlinear timeline.

The book attempts to explore themes around roots, family, love, oppression and more, but none of it reached me in the way I hoped it would. I think if the writing style resonated more with me, my experience could have been very different. It just didn't "click", and I almost found myself skimming parts of the book. There was. a line comparing his mothers nipples to diamonds, a visual I really didn't need to imagine.

There were some quite descriptive and disturbing scenes around death and violence, mostly towards animals, something I simply do not want to read about. It put a sour taste in my mouth, and made me further disengage with the book.

I want to make clear that this book is absolutely not bad. I think there are many people who will absolutely love it. To whom the language will sing, the nuance will make them ponder, and the space between the lines resonate. Unfortunately, that was just not me.

Thank you to Netgalley and FSG Originals for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks so much to the publisher and Netgalley for an e-arc for this book.

I think the prose in this book was gorgeously written but, unfortunately, too experimental for me. I tried hard to understand and had to reread pages and sections constantly, and often, I was still left a bit confused.

I think experimental literature is super important and this will be very popular with the right crowd, just not me.

This was a strange one, I have to admit. The prose was beautiful and confounding... and a little hard to follow.
That's not too say I didn't find it facinating, and it was definitely out of my comfort zone in a good way. I just tend to go for more character-driven plots and this was more centered on the settings.

A beautiful, aching novel set in the near-future, a society reeling from disaster. The sentences here were astonishing. Not to mention the formal departures. A brisk novel about intimacy, family, survival. I loved it so much. Thank you to the publisher for the e-galley.

The language and prose in novel was so rich and beautiful which can sometimes make me take a little longer to enjoy the book but after the first few chapters I couldn't put the book down.

This story was super impactful and I will be thinking about for years to come.

A brief and impactful novel that manages to touch on endurance, escape, familial obligations, and post-apocalyptic queer love while evoking near-constant existential dread that in other circumstances might cause me to put a book down. Gripping and poetic, the unflinching depiction of life within a militarized society that's crept in after a nebulous disaster is stressful and—especially when nature is being described—intoxicating. Faye Lethem's translation—which deftly matches the flow of Pol Guasch's Catalan original—is a gift for English-language readers.

Set in a militarized society in the wake of an unspecified disaster in which families have been uprooted, the dead are lying unburied, and men with shaved heads patrol the land, "Napalm in the Heart" is a story of escape, survival, and love that's on par with Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road." Mara Faye Lethem's translation matches the tone, texture, and flow of Pol Guasch's prose to perfection. An absolutely riveting debut.

"my son, the fire is always inside: like napalm in the heart" - it said the thing!

'But you're right, the heart doesn't lie because it only speaks to us in one language, and we dont have our ,series, nameless and wordless, within our chests"

Okay ill bite, it takes a minute to get into the pace of things, to immerse into the language and true appreciate the pace and narrative, but once you do, my god it is just stunning. Guasch is just a complete genius, theres no other words. He is a master of texture and tone and scene and rhythm.

It's haunting, heart wrenching and intimate. Lyrically gut punching. And I believe it has fundamentally changed me. Im just shocked.

And I so desperately wish I could read it in its original language. It feels wrong to read it in English.

Somehow manages to be extremely matter of fact and unflinching in its look at death and violence while also being a tender queer love story. I loved the writing here but was left wanting more from the plot, I kind of wish it was a little longer so things could be fleshed out more. An unsettling, murky exploration of a future world that has gorgeous language and nature descriptions- I’ll definitely pick up more books by this author in the future!

This one started out super strong for me. The language and prose is so rich and dreamy. The story was very slow and kind of lost my interest along the way unfortunately.

“Napalm in the Heart” – Pol Guasch (translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem)

Interesting one, to say the least. My thanks to @netgalley and @fsgbooks for my copy of this in exchange for an honest review. This one is published 13th August.

who would come find me in that forest?

who would now tell me NO in a language

without a language?

later the tanks left

later you left

my son, the fire is always inside: like napalm in the heart

goodbye

In the near future, a son and mother live on the edge of a forest. The world around them is in the aftermath of an unnamed disaster, and military presence is part of everyday life. His mother works a clearly traumatic job at the Factory while the son helps her at home and sends letters to his lover, Boris, who lives in a city on the other side of the forest. The boys dreams of a life away from the aggressive skinheads that threaten him and his mother, and one that becomes more of a necessity after a violent act upturns everything

I seem to be in a phase of dark, post-apocalyptic fiction from Spain at the moment, though this is quite different from “Out in the Open”, which I read recently. This one is far more fractured and poetic, focusing on emotions and inner turmoil more than plot or events, which often makes it a bit complicated to read. What emerges from the occasional maelstrom, however, is frequently beautiful and engaging, especially the narrator’s letters to Boris laying out his hopes for the future. It’s a poetic, experimental style that can be hard to follow at points, but for those who get into it, there’s a lot to like here once you get into it. Plus, I’m always happy to see more Catalan fiction translated into English!

Keep an eye out for this one and let me know if you read it!