Chad Post at The Quarterly Conversation:
One of the most ambitious, audacious books of recent memory, Lost Empress by Sergio de la Pava brings together a smorgasbord of plot lines and scenes ranging from the serious to the comic, including: a clash between the NFL and the Indoor Football League, the history of Joni Mitchell’s career, the heist of a lost Dalí, a court case involving a high-profile murder and an incredibly intelligent inmate, the Mandela Effect, the life of a 911 operator, the origins of a brain tumor, quantum mechanics and the mind-body divide as it relates to time and consciousness, an accidental impaling and the said consequences of such as relates to the nature of getting revenge, multiple love stories that go unfulfilled, and a fight between a pig mascot and a crab one.
Unsurprisingly, this book is over 600 pages long, which, at a time in which the books garnering the most praise tend to be short, dark, and scary, feels almost like an aesthetic zag where everyone else is zigging. This is also more or less the same way that you could characterize de la Pava’s entire literary career.
more here.