Jakarta

September 2, 2019
Márquez Tizano’s debut is a feverishly depicted panorama of a city laid low by a series of surreal events and misfortunes. An unnamed narrator and his partner rarely leave the room they share as their illness-ravaged city teeters on the brink of disaster outside, its citizens enlivened only by a vast gambling network centered on a near-sacred sport. As some new horror approaches, the narrator chronicles his childhood teachers and their bizarre lessons, his life as a former hazmat worker during the peak of the “Z-bug” epidemic, and later as a refugee in a series of underground tunnels meant to prevent the spread of the virus. As he recalls these strange, apocalyptic experiences, he describes a unique cast of characters, including his prophetic, prolific friend Morgan, whose journals seem to be sending messages to the narrator, and his partner Clara, who has discovered a strange stone that may or may not be granting her visions of the past. Lacking a clear or typical trajectory, this short novel is dense with imagery and boundless imagination, creating a vividly grotesque reality for those who exist within its society: the disillusioned gamblers, the cleanup crews, the bureaucrats, and the Z-bug’s dead. Blending the wildly dystopian with the mundanity of the everyday, this time-jumping narrative is a bolt of originality from a writer to watch.

September 1, 2019
An impressionistic, abstract portrait of a society clawing back from a viral epidemic. The unnamed narrator of Tizano's debut lives in Atlantika, which seems constructed out of stray parts from other dystopian novels. The ruling government is a technocratic autocracy that soothes the populace by encouraging it to bet on games of Vakapý, a modified version of jai alai played by robots. (The Orwellian-sounding Department of Chaos and Gaming handles the transactions.) A devastating outbreak called the Ź-Bug has wiped out a chunk of the population, and the narrator of the novel is a veteran of the Ź-Brigađe, charged with clearing rats from sewers and other unpleasant sites. Back at home, the narrator's partner, Clara, is consulting with a large, vaguely oracular glowing stone that calls up, among other things, memories of the narrator's classmates at a religious school before they were pressed into Ź-Bug service. The novel's milieu evokes Philip K. Dick at his gloomiest, and the narrator's mood can be as defeated as anybody's in Atwood or Orwell. ("Progress, hope, all of that: I never bought any of it.") Its style is unique to Tizano, however. The novel is structured in numbered paragraphs, each an often digressive study of a childhood memory, a vision from the stone, or Atlantika's despairing society. The nonlinear approach can befuddle, and though translator Bunstead ably stabilizes the tone, stray plot threads can be hard to parse. (Is the snow there really red, or is the narrator imagining things?) The title partly refers to a code name for the narrator, and the story invites readings as an allegory for our loss of identity in the face of social and epidemiological threats. Clear lessons are in short supply, though. An assured but challenging anti-narrative, its offbeat structure evoking a world slipped off its axis.

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December 4, 2020
Apocalyptic novels have been popular for so long now, it may seem impossible to bring anything new to the genre. And yet Tizano's debut novel does exactly that, not so much by upending familiar conventions--young protagonist, omnipresent military, underground resistance--as by plunging full-bore into a world that is uniquely strange. In the bowels of an unnamed city, somewhere in the Americas, the narrator and his romantic partner huddle in a room as the latest strain of a recurring series of viruses ravages the population. Locked inside, the narrator attempts to recall events that led to the moment of storytelling, but he is frustrated by a haunted object that projects hallucinations into his tale. Tizano's swirling prose detours and sidetracks through gambling addictions, byzantine bureaucracies, and a worldwide obsession with hipball, a sport similar to an ancient Native American game. Like an aperture slowly dilating, these vivid particulars aggregate to form an entire picture, eventually bringing its subject into focus. While not a casual read, Tizano's ambitious, frenetic, and endlessly imaginative first novel will reward anyone diligent enough to stick it out to the end.

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