La noche Sucks

Night Sucks

Night falls over Albuquerque. An adolescent is hitchhiking along the interstate. Logan prepares to open the Launchpad. Benny Gonsales listens to the King singing from his trailer. Two twin nerds play with firearms in the garage of their house and Poppa Neutrino strums a guitar and devises soccer techniques. On the other side of the Rio Grande an elderly woman reads a hymn in front of her trailer and the vagrant on Fourth Street, lying between cardboard boxes, dreams that his thoughts can build the world. In the dark intimacy of his room, a Serbian chats with virtual girlfriends, and a woman or a child goes walking through subterranean paths that lead to the centre of the earth. Night falls on Albuquerque, a crossroads in the middle of nowhere that smells of beans and burritos, a bypass surrounded by motels, diners, scattered sad-looking houses, with swings in the veranda and a flag almost always at half-mast for some dead person. And Michael Astorga, murderer of the deputy sheriff of Bernalillo, tries to escape although knows he has nowhere to go.

Blanca Riestra presents us with a circular novel in Night Sucks and with a series of erratic characters that seek each other out but do not meet, while wandering the streets rimmed with neon lights. With short strokes, she submerges us in their alienated, solitary, nights, in an Albuquerque that, in the form of a funnel, suctions everything into the darkness of the night. With certain reminiscences of Barnes, Bolaño, Ford and Dos Passos, the author shapes her own vision of the total novel, of the forest novel, in an Albuquerque that is an expressionist of the dirty realism that intones this sad ballad as a voice of voices, the pivotal character of the interlaced experiences of beggars, Navajo Indians, war veterans, TV shopping addicts and old poets that await death. Night falls in Albuquerque.