Fireflies
Luis Sagasti, Fionn Petch (translation)Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Beuys, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Neil Armstrong, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Beatles, Japanese poets, Brazilian priests, Russian cosmonauts and many more cross these pages, and Sagasti finds common threads that weave them together into a single narrative.
The fireflies themselves perhaps provide the key to understanding this book. They become a metaphor for the resistance of certain luminous moments, certain twinkling fragments of history, to the passing of time. They remind us that events do not always simply disappear neatly into the darkness, but rather remain, floating in the air, lighting up the night sky indefinitely. Sagasti shows us that the present moment, like this novel, is a tapestry woven of a multiplicity of times.
Using his unique, poetic and keenly observant style, Sagasti transforms the accidents of history into a single, lyrical constellation, and for the reader it is an extraordinary sight.