Books
Agustín Fernández Mallo

The Book of All Loves

In the wake of the Great Blackout, faced with the near-extinction of humanity, a pair of lovers speak to each other. They parse, with precision, with familiarity, the endless aspects of their love. Out of their dialogues, piece by piece, a composite image of love takes form, one that moves outwards beyond the realm of relationships and into metaphysics, geology, linguistics, AI.

Years previously, a writer and her husband, a Latin professor, stay in Venice while she works on a text. As they roam the city, strange occurrences accumulate, signalling that the world around them is heading towards a point of no return.

Blending fiction and essay, poetry and philosophy, Agustín Fernández Mallo's The Book of All Loves is a startling, expansive work of imaginative agility, one that renders love unfamiliar so as to renew it, and makes the case for hope in the midst of a disintegrating present.
183 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2024
Publication year
2024
Translator
Thomas Bunstead
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  • noelnoelstephenshared an impression5 months ago
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    It's really an impressive book.

Quotes

  • nishak73338has quoted5 months ago
    Where has it come from, this whole landscape of wounds?

    – he says.

    From bodies without passion, which are also landscape.
  • Katia Patshas quoted5 months ago
    This science we call economics exists and makes sense only in a world where resources are scarce; if goods and commodities were infinite, there would be no logic to it as a discipline, as it would lose its subject and have nothing to either study or regulate. Our societies have seemingly been constructed on the basis of this congenital scarcity in the world. In western culture, it’s already there in the Bible; from the garden that is bountiful without being worked to the disapproval of working for one’s daily bread, which will materialize without anyone breaking a sweat. The apparent crisis in the music industry, with its origins in the early 21st century, and the also apparently infinite availability of songs on the Internet, is only the panic experienced in the face of the move from an economy of (musical) scarcity – run by a handful of individuals – to an economy of abundance – the infinite reproduction of sounds at no apparent cost; a situation in which the economic sciences as currently conceived would cease to have any practical or philosophical meaning. Gender theories have something revealing to offer here: from the masculine/feminine binary, or an economy of sexual identity based on a limited number of genders, to the potentially infinite spectrum of genders in-between that an individual may adopt, a kind of economy of (gender) abundance comes about in which learnt social norms lose
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    all validity, giving rise to a panic among those who do not wish to or are unable to give up control of that particular privation. There is a certain structural link between all of this and the incipient field of quantum computing. The foundational property of these future computers is the ability to work not only in binary states, not solely with ones and zeros, but also using everything between the two poles of one and zero, making for potentially infinite possibilities that in turn give rise to worlds and planes of reality not only previously unknown but unimagined, though not therefore impossible. What we could call Gender Abundance Love would therefore be the forerunner, the analogue speartip, as it were, of this other digital abundance towards which computers are heading. (Gender Abundance Love)
  • Katia Patshas quoted5 months ago
    Meaning that when we transmit information, we also transmit all of those forgotten worlds, although in a manner that we are still yet to completely comprehend. This forgetting is me introduced into the heads of others, is my life enclosed in that place, or the part of me accessible only to the person who – in the experience of love – has me inside their head, even though this person (I know) may have forgotten me forever. (Oblivion love)
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