Coda — Rene Belletto

“It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt.” With this sentence René Belletto begins a novel that compresses every genre he has worked in -- thriller, science fiction, experimental literature, horror -- into one breathless narrative in which what is at stake is nothing less than our own immortality.

 

Playing with the expectations of the reader, Belletto constructs a logical puzzle that defies logic, much like the “almost-perpetual motion machine” invented by the narrator of this novel and his father. What sets the story in (perpetual) motion is a package of frozen seafood. This lowly mechanism triggers a series of picaresque and otherworldly events, from the storyteller's meeting with Fate disguised as a beautiful woman, to the kidnapping of his daughter, to his amorous reunion with the younger half-sister of a high school friend, to the elimination of death from the world. It's a funny business, but Belletto's playful and falsely transparent language opens the book to such serious matters as explorations of death, immortality, love, and the innocence of children.