Thai-American Tony Tulathimutte (Spingfield, 1983) debuted with Private citizens (2016), a cheeky novel where four millennial Stanford graduates interact in San Francisco and reveal people’s insecurities become part of the inner universe of the Internet. Rechazo, In the second novel, he plunges into a similar panorama, but now leads his characters to the edge of the abyss.
Rechazo
Tony Tulathimutte
Translated by Manuel Cuesta. AdN, 2026. 320 pages. €20.95
Formally, these are interrelated relationships; a narrative model that lived with similar works in the golden era of the early twentieth century Winesburg, Ohio (1919), de Sherwood Anderson, Fr Heavenly meadows (1932), de Steinbeck.
Each of the stories that make up the volume is autonomous, but it is the combination, more than the occasional reappearance of some characters, that manages to give the work unity and feeling. Rechazo the logic of the Internet and the absurd reality of words emerge to the reader which condition the form in which most young people began to verse a similar matter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s opening quote – “but the most curious are those who come to us indignant because we have lived a different life” – sums up masterfully the type of protagonists the book contains.
Freud planteaba en More to the beginning of the groove (1920) that the desire represented by Eros was opposed to the “drive of death” that drives the individual to self-destruction, and this is a common characteristic of people undergoing the “feminist”, “Foros”, “Ahegao o Blada de la repression”, “Nuetro superfuturo”, “El personaje clave”, “Ten “Rech:foras”.
As regards fearful and morally rooted peopletorpedoes in their social relations, lonely and withdrawn. Nothing like the type of modernist anti-hero or postmodernist contestants in the style used by Bret Easton Ellis or Palahniuk; the people of Tulathimutte are still blind to reality, to their existential emptiness, they are the same, and not the world, they are self-deprecating.
“He assumes that even bad relationships are better than no relationships, that they can prepare him for one of the future relationships,” says the anonymous protagonist of “Feminists”; a man who “doesn’t want pity; doesn’t need pity. All his girlfriends have asked him at some point” (p. 17).
The reference to Freud had a double purpose, as sex is transformed into a process of meditation on social acceptance. I hear that the internet is transformed into a battlefield from where collective linchamientos are produced in their own way.
Alison, the protagonist of “Photos,” experiences the trauma of being caught in the only relationship she’s ever had. Your connection to the real world and the reality of life is questionable at best.
The author portrays fearful and engaging characters, tortures and depicts them in their relationships
“Ten Metaphors” is what the title suggests. Her last words: “Metaphor means ‘to cross the road’. Rechazo means ‘to leave the race’. You throw yourself at a girl… and she throws you back. Fracaso means ‘caer’.” (p. 301) “Re: Rechazo” fancifully reproduces the redundancy-worthy supuesto correo de rechazo editorial to his work Rechazo.
In a strange way, I was interested in “Key Character” – more novel the report (90 pages) -, a sublime story in which Tulathimutte reveals with an open heart the disturbing perception of people of his own generation: “What I wonder if, against what I have defined my own person, how others see me, how I should behave: I have not agreed on anything…, you made a terrible joke on me that my friends could get into”. (pp. 220-221).

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