Been putting off reviewing this for weeks now, mostly stemming from how I can't really articulate what I like and don't like about this book. The general premise is interesting, at least to my standards: A group of roomates in Madrid all conspire together to create a video game, one that is apparently of great controversy and illegality. The roomates all are on the fringes of society in one way or another, Kiki is a writer in the style of Bataille and a devotee of pornographic novels who is writing her own sordid boarding school erotica on a government grant, El Cuco is a hacker as well as a pickpocket operating on a moral code of some kind derived from his Catalan separatist parents, Ivan is a writer dealing with gender identity issues. Finally there is a mysterious set of triplets, the Terans, who are nominally college students but do not attend classes and seem to be the instigators of the development of the titular game Nefando (literally meaning the unspeakable).

It is here that my hesitations start, and I will be blunt about the twist here if that is of any concern to those reading: The triplets' and Nefando's intertwined mystery gets revealed halfway into the novel: the triplets were viciously repeatedly raped by their father in their childhood, this abuse was filmed and uploaded online by their father. The triplets later use this footage and inserts it into the video game Nefando, the game itself resembling a point and click mystery game reflecting other details from their childhoods. The game gets uploaded onto the internet and becomes an underground sensation as users on message boards try to figure out the arcane solutions to progress the game (clicking on a sleeping woman enough times eventually kills her, her limp corpse dangling off the bed reveals a name written on her leg, this name provides access to a computer). The footage is eventually discovered at the end of the game, and the game is scrubbed from the internet.

For those online around 2015 this might sound familiar, as a similar series of events (without the dramatic backstory of the triplets) occurred when a youtuber purported to have downloaded the video game Sad Satan off the "dark web", which then got reuploaded elsewhere on the internet with child porn images added, maybe added by a third party to make it more shocking and grab some attention. It worked and it became a kind of internet sensation for a little while, something so base and nakedly vile providing a fodder for a million youtube videos. It seems clear to me that Nefando is a work that is inspired by Sad Satan but wants to ask what the intentions are behind the creators as well as those who consume games such as these.

Monica Ojeda posits three philosophical views through the three roommates aside from the triplets. It should be noted that in the story the child abuse footage was added in secretly by the triplets. The Hacker has a libertarian view on the matter, almost as you would expect from someone holding a very old stereotypical counter cultural style (Like Ginsberg, perhaps). His ultimate statement is that its old footage anyway, and its their abuse and thus its their right to explore it as they wish. The porno writer talks, not in direct connection to Nefando the game I might add, of sexual repression and the sublimation of sexuality into religious fervor. The other writer doesn't really add much new (or at least in my reading) but divulges that they had committed rape. All three of these views I don't think are meant to be morally supported by the book or are meant to be positive answers to the question of why the triplets did what they did, rather they seem to be answers of how each of the three characters justifies (or fails to) their own collaboration in something quite wicked. Through regression, avoidance, repression the three justify or avoid their involvement with Nefando to a largely unseen investigator of some nature.

Then of course there is the question what of those who play games like Nefando or Sad Satan, or more realistically, read about and watch them from a distance? I don't think the answer in Nefando or real life is that these people are drawn to it for the the material in it itself, but rather for the extremity of the content and the luridness around it. To maybe make a trite comparison, it is the same drive that makes people drawn to true crime, but formulated in a (maybe) more antisocial way. Ojeda from my understanding states this most explicitly in the following:

The siblings said, with good reason, that there
are two ways to face our humanity: digging into the sky or
digging into the earth. Clouds or worms. Sky-blue or black.
Normally we all dig into the sky, because only crazy people look
down and excavate. Supposedly we want the immensity, not our
own but the one that’s beyond us, that’s always far away from
skin and bones, far away from the dust to which we’ll return and
use to feed the grass. I’ll tell you one thing, and this I learned
with the Teráns, it’s always better to dig into the earth. It isn’t
the easy path. It’s painful, yes, but all knowledge is a splinter,
embedded and impossible to remove. Looking up, climbing clouds,
getting farther and farther away from yourself and what you are,
you can come to know your painting, but never yourself. Because
yeah, man, don’t look at me like that: we’re knowable, even if it’s
an unstable, broken knowing, we can explore ourselves like a
cave. The siblings knew themselves. They knew their quicksand,
and that in itself is a lot, tío. Fuck. What do you want me to
say? The siblings were plausible and possible. That was enough
for me.”

Is there truth in the most basest and evil aspects of our society? In our worst and most grievous wounds? That is basically a truism that everyone can agree with but the question is what is gleaned from it? In Nefando, I have no clue what is to be learned and understood throughout this. I hoped to maybe resolve this in writing this but I think I have only just expounded on my confusion. The novel ends in an anticlimax, the Teran triplets disappear, the characters disperse to the corners of the world to be interviewed by an unmanned investigator, there seems to be no resolution. Maybe the Terans had proven that their abuse was not just a heartbreaking tragic incident but something that had demand, that had a market. Maybe in this there was some reclamation, and the grand point of it is we are not so inclined to look at the sky, but to grasp at the dirt for the obscene and the evil.

I still don't know what to think of the book. There is something here and I think I might not be able to pick apart what Ojeda is doing here. The subject material is tough enough on its own and the ambiguity makes one hyper-focus on it and a kind of calculus in my head emerges. Is the book doing something interesting or meaningful enough to warrant the transgression? I've enjoyed books dealing with similarly dark content before (The Sluts by Dennis Cooper for one), its not necessarily the transgression that I disagree with. It is that I don't know what it is really doing with it that is the issue for me, maybe this will be resolved with a reread one day down the road. The writing here is good and I feel like there must be something I am missing something, it is clear Ojeda is not dealing with merely shock value here, one day I hope I understand it.

Nefando

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