Jordi Costa recommends "a very fun novel with a youthful spirit"

BarcelonaThe critic and essayist Jordi Costa, head of exhibitions at the CCCB, assures that he has read Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, A oscuras (Tusquets, 2026), with a certain "tension between the reading speed the book demands and the need to savor each page", aware that, after finishing it, he will surely not read another novel by the veteran American writer, who is already 89 years old. Costa, who confesses to being "a big fan" of Pynchon, found A oscuras to be "a very fun and youthful novel", although the reading process was curious: "Lately I felt that I had gotten used to Pynchon's long and digressive sentences, but in this book that no longer happened to me and it took me a while to acclimatize. And I think it's a matter of code, because the story is set in the thirties and draws from the noir novels of Hammett and Chandler".

Costa admires Pynchon's sense of humor, "a little desperate and over it all", and the choice of a dancing detective as the protagonist. "The idea of dancing and abandoning oneself to pleasure in a world that is falling apart, where fascism is beginning to emerge, synthesizes Pynchon's attitude towards reality: instead of succumbing to nihilism, he has a sense of romanticism and a pleasure principle that remains as a subversive force", he argues.

A novel generous in ideas ("There are enough for seven books", he points out), Costa highlights Dracula as a character who regrets having gone down in history as Vlad the Impaler and "other delirious occurrences", but qualifies that "in Pynchon's satire there is always a real background, it is not gratuitous imagination". And he adds that, although Paul Thomas Anderson has adapted Pynchon – most recently in Una batalla rere l'altra–, his reading offers "an essentially literary pleasure, with such a quantity of zigzags and characters per page that it is difficult to imagine it being transferred to the cinema".