Stop, Bullet!
CANDAYA 2024, 432 p. LITERARY FICTION, Spanish
A brilliant satire on madness, literature, and the transformative power of fiction.
Piatkun is a “novel” actor who sends letters to dead writers. Without Piatkun, Russian literature would be incomprehensible; it is his fault that the second part of Dead Souls never saw the light of day. Piatkun wrote with his body the missing pages of a host of seminal novels; he was on first-name terms with Napoleon, Bartleby and Pushkin. Piatkun hates Nikolai Gogol.
Piatkun was born in Toledo, lived in Barcelona and now waits in Vulturó. Piatkun has a rather complicated relationship with his mother and descends from a line of heroic cyclists. Piatkun is the only altar boy who ever danced to disco music. Just seeing a woman makes poor Piatkun tremble.
Piatkun’s name is Franco, Franco Piatkun, or so he says. He says all that. Because the truth is that we have nothing more than his words gathered in ten letters, there is nothing more than what he says… His memory flirting with delirium, his project to penetrate the mystery of plagiarism, his trauma of being eternally secondary, his illusion of starting a fourth life.
With humour that borders on satire and absurdity, Robert Juan-Cantavella delves into the ghosts of madness to ask himself how far fiction can drag us when we let ourselves be carried away by it.Stop, Bullet! is a sad mockery, an epistolary novel, the chronicle of continuous plundering, a story that someone has infected with many other stories.
Jorge Carrión, La Vanguardia, 19 February 2025
“To give shape to this fantasy or meta-literary twist, Juan-Cantavella creates the neologism “novelaje” (the filming of a novel). Piatkun, the protagonist, plays secondary characters from Heart of Darkness and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, among many other works. These experiences turn him into a reader who, after exploring the workings of dozens of literary fictions, can share what he has learned with masters from the last three centuries in a novel that is as encyclopaedic as it is unpredictable. And by mirror effect: with us, his tribe.”
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