The genre-hopping, award-winning Mexican writer, poet, musician and teacher Julián Herbert (Tomb Song; The House of the Pain of Others) runs rampant with violence in his latest, the electrifying fiction collection Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino.
The impressive assemblage opens and closes with the same sentence: "that thing you call 'human experience' is just a massacre of onion layers." The comparative reasons are graphic, from "nothing tastes so much of blood as a dismembered onion," to additional insistently convincing similarities having to do with spray splatter and fatal crushings. In the first story, "The Ballad of Mother Teresa of Calcutta," the narrator gleefully reveals his "pleasure of depositing a little vomit on those readers who adore straightforward literature." A hack-for-hire, he's just fine with "hijacking the memories and anecdotes of certain clients" when they don't pay, most recently revealing a wayward Pemex executive's nauseating airport encounter with Mother Teresa. In the novella-length, titular last story, another writer--this time, a film critic who insists "the main function of criticism is to misread everything"--is summoned by Jacobo Montaña, "the most wanted man in Mexico," who demands "the head of that f*cking bastard" (yes, Quentin Tarantino) not only for being Montaña's unaware doppelgänger but for stealing what should have been Montaña's own celluloid life.
Reunited with award-winning translator Christina MacSweeney, Herbert presents 10 stories ready to disturb, quite possibly even disgust. That said, even for the most reluctant readers, the surprisingly immersive humor and slyly playful wit make resistance futile. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon