I want to begin by recalling what Morrison’s student claimed about the first solo novel of AG Porta, a work he described as “as clear as a Hockney painting” (126). The cruelty and murder depicted by the rat king, embodied by the sewer choir led by a failed author, feels less obvious yet no less prophetic. This pupil of Morrison, Roberto Bolaño, frequently cited him, sometimes to question his own critical stance, and today repeats that same reflection on life, its flow, appearances, deception, and happiness (126). And finally, at the center of this discussion, the fascination has always existed, yet only in recent years has it moved from a narrow scholarly circle into broader public attention.
Acantilado offers us what may well be the best Christmas story of the year, delivered a month early. A meta-story—a fairy tale where reality and fiction conspire to form a plot that is at once delusional and satirical. The narrative imagines a large corporation’s CEO transformed into a disgraced rat, a magical turn wrought by a failed writer who leans on the grand tradition of Christmas storytelling to craft a major work—one and three—blending the above’s notes. The year promises, in effect, to keep this tale in the pipeline. It is not written, yet it has already been written to entertain us. And what a pleasure it is.
The title, which I won’t waste space repeating, says it all—or at least hints at enough to be meaningful. This first “king of the mice” signals a Christmas tale of sorts, where Porta will encounter more than just the names of Scrooge’s children. The excess length, inversely proportional to the novel’s traditional brevity, marks the mastery and irony that permeate the pages. Readers already know this cadence; it feeds the addiction mentioned earlier. In the end, the work seems to stumble into itself. Porta guides the reader from the very start with a humor that unsettles interpretation: when the moment comes to ask whether North is truly North, the author circles back again and again to the same, revealing the very terrain to examine—what kinds of activities, what he terms experiences, can be enacted and explored.
Most readers, rightly, resist being fooled. Porta does not trick them; he names the deception boldly and with rhythm, inviting a sense of moral caution rather than anger. The effect is a slightly distorted mirror that nonetheless reflects a stubborn realism and humor. Yet beneath the surface, it is about literary ideas and the process by which they are produced—how the act of writing becomes an object of scrutiny in the narrative itself.
In the story, the unsuccessful writer-protagonist holds a bundle of ideas, but he never completes any of them. It falls to the narrator to finish the project in a notebook of sketches that the novel presents within its own frame, delivering it in a new and unexpected format. The author’s celebrated originality—often questioned, sometimes attacked as self-indulgent—appears here as a deliberate homage to the classic Christmas tradition, a wink to readers that acknowledges the genre while reinventing it.
The unwritten tale unfolds through several phases, bringing the CEO, aided by his wife, into a sequence that stretches from Christmas to Twelfth Night in a literary echo of The Apartment. The question of authorship lingers: which writer is at the helm? There are moments when Porta gently reminds us that lack of originality is obvious, and that the public figure of Scrooge has already appeared on screens more than once. This return to the original premise reframes what a simple holiday tale can become. What began as a familiar Christmas story grows into a singular fairy tale, inviting readers to approach the act of reading as a playful, evolving game.
In a sense, this book marks Porta’s first standalone work following a long heptalogy, in which recurring characters have appeared and receded, forging their own distinct narrative universes. The early piece, Ignoring, My name is Vila-Matas, is not a conventional novel, yet its significance lies in the persistent demand for originality and genius that the author consistently pursued. Fate, perhaps, to the author’s credit, has been kind to the craft. The execution is polished, the ideas audacious, and the wit sharp. The figure at the center—now separated from his pages—means the storytelling remains untarnished, its friendship and fidelity intact.