A very contemporary Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this five-part novel chronicles a polyphonic confluence of events during a single summer’s night at a queer music festival. Set amid the mystical backdrop of remote woods, the story follows a wide cast of queer and cis-het characters whose very disparate realities unexpectedly converge within an illusory, playful, inebriated evening. The nexus of the story hinges on the experiences of two friends and main characters: Ava, a wealthy, conventionally attractive heiress, and Agnes, a reclusive, bisexual, and literary daughter of deceased bohemian artists. The two attend the festival with the intent of seeing Agnes’s favorite queer music group perform: Titania & the Tales. In addition to these voices, we encounter many more: a nonbinary worker at a Japanese ice cream stand, a Popper King obsessed with Emily Brontë, a J.K. Rowling-hating photographer, a rowdy circle of straight men who have penetrated what should have been a safe and bigotry-free space, and a life-saving group of drag queens. Via a sinuous web of incidents, the self-proclaimed cis-het Ava falls in love with a trans man, and the once-hopelessly-romantic Agnes forms a casually sexual friendship with a man named Demetrio.

 One of the most salient strengths of the novel lies in its boldly experimental nature. What is at face-value a play (or at least a play in form), is subverted by its incorporation of poems, narratives, song excerpts—among other literary mediums. The novel challenges any inclination to categorize, defiantly standing outside any genre. Such defiance, along with its witty jargon, sassy character voices, and bawdy subject matter (sex, drugs, astrology) makes for a strikingly modern novel, all the while integrating literary tradition, too. Brimming with references to Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Marguerite Duras—among others—the story repeatedly nods at these now-classic tales and the idea that they once, too, shocked and confounded readers. In a similar vein, Éxtasis… prods at reinvention on a thematic level, it asks how being at a festival in the middle of dim and distant woods allows for said reinvention; and it asks how much of our identity hinges on our environment and the parameters we set for ourselves. The novel’s grand scale parallels Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a euphoric night in the woods wherein everyone’s perceived “truth” is destabilized.

 

430 pages – Original Language: Spanish World/Spain (H&O editores, 2024)