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Malditos terricolas
Old rock stars don't have it easy. And if anyone disagrees, tell it to Iván Uturría. At 40, his life is a disaster. He's been fired from a job he hates, his girlfriend has thrown him out and to top it all off nobody knows how to pronounce his surname correctly. Iván moves in with the only friends he has left, waiting for a solution from on high. But from on high come something entirely different: an alien invasion. As panic grips Madrid, its inhabitants, with little talent and much less heroism will attempt to tough it out. J. Olloqui parodies the classic stories of alien invasions, in a vision that is neither mythical or glamorous, but is catastrophically entertaining.
Imagine Independence Day acted out by the characters from Shaun of the Dead, and you’ve got a fair summary of how Malditos Terrícolas will pan out. The book is crying out to be made into a film, with fast-paced banter between the characters and detail that lends itself to widescreen imagery. And this helps with the general vastness implied by both the impossibility of an alien spaceship taking over the skies above Madrid, and the enormity of the craft itself and the situation its inhabitants initiate.In fact, the idea of being small and helpless in the face of an unstoppable force is portrayed in many ways through the plot and setting, and in the characters themselves, who survive the alien invasion through sheer luck and pig-headedness rather than any heroic action.
The main character Ivan is in a bad way at the start of the book, a failed rock star, dumped by his long-suffering girlfriend and left jobless and homeless by his refusal to abandon his principals. (…) Somebody in fact to whom we can all relate, and who has enough wit and vulnerability to invoke our empathy and trust. The author makes caricatures of all his characters; each is a stereotype, and this makes the humorous context easily attainable (…)
(…) The book is a combination of sarcasm, absurdity, terror and graphic violence, which merge to balance each other out and make it into a real page-turner. (…) The deadpan, acerbic comic elements would be easily translatable for a British audience (…)
In conclusion, I consider this book to have great potential for translation into English (…)
I believe this would be a fun book to translate, and could find a niche in the British market that would make it very popular.
From the reader´s report by Suky Taylor