Biography
Fran Alonso is an experienced writer, journalist and editor, and the director of the Galician publishing house Edicións Xerais. He has written numerous works of fiction for adults and young people, including Trailer (1991), about the lives and myths of transport workers, Cemetery of Elephants (1994), about the happenings of the night, Silence (1995), which looks at the schizophrenia of the urban world, Headaches (2001), about social anxiety, and Nobody (2011), about the occupants of an apartment block and the influence of virtual reality in our lives. His work on poetry has been similarly groundbreaking and includes a popular anthology of Galician poetry for young readers called Get Poetic! (2006). He is a regular contributor to Galician-language media and maintains a blog, Cabrafanada.
Synopsis
Nobody (200 pages) is made up of ten short stories, each of which is followed by a hoax email. There is then a short author’s epilogue.
Sample
I’ve always been depressed by noise. For me, depression is noise. Depression is a fly that enters your ear, reaches your ear drum, and you have a tough time getting it out. I never know whether it’s noise that gives me depression or depression that makes me constantly hear noise, but it’s as if a fly had entered my ear and injected its infernal buzzing there. I can’t stand noises, they put me in a bad mood, so when that dull, loud thud came through the wall for the umpteenth time that day, I had to accept there was no way you could live without noises in these deafening times. And I wondered whether there was a damn apartment in the whole universe that didn’t have noisy neighbours or, better still, didn’t have any neighbours. Everything seemed to indicate there wasn’t. Perhaps I just end up always sharing walls with the same kind of noise apologists. Two weeks ago, when I had rented the apartment and moved in, it had struck me as a quiet place. In fact, I had chosen it because of the calmness and serenity I discerned there. Now I had realized I had made a mistake. What with the dull, loud thuds coming from the other side of the living-room wall, the shouts of the woman upstairs, the drills and hammers of DIY fanatics, the eternal arguments of a couple that echoed unmistakably around the light well at lunchtime, the guffaws of the boss in the office downstairs and his ugly great voice whenever he talked on the speakerphone, the ill-defined voices of television sets, which would attack from all flanks, the panting of the couples fucking noisily at night and the car horns coming from outside, all this, more than a friendly neighbourhood, sounded like the subtle bombardment of a psychological war.