"Give in to the alienating impulse, to the dead weight of the gregarious, to the abulia of the everyday: that is Mediocristán." - Playground Magazine
"Luis Noriega laughs, and that a lot. 'Mediocristan Is A Pieceful Place' is, above all, an amusing novel where the protagonist turns against himself with a tenacity that ends up being tender." - Anita de Hoyos, El Espectador
"By giving preeminence to the novel, we have not only forgotten the importance of the story as the cornerstone of literature. We have also overlooked the magnificent work that Luis Noriega [is] doing in this field." - Mario Jursich Durán
"Intensely seductive" - Eudald Espluga, Playground Magazine
“The unpronounceable name of the abyss that exists between our aspirations and our achievements is ‘failure’. […] Supposedly, Failure was also my final destination, but along the way I stopped off in Mediocristán, and discovered that it was a peaceful place.”
After many years of absence, the protagonist of this novel gets ready to abandon the tranquility of his life in Barcelona to return to his hometown. A return to the ghosts of his past – his paunchy old friends and his parents’ expectations – threatening to put the peacefulness of Mediocristán at risk, the moral territory in which he has settled to live comfortably.
Mediocristán is a sometimes uncomfortable novel, insolently cynical, that confronts us with our own vulgarity. The Mediocristán that Luis Noriega paints is a transitory region in an improbable purgatory; an ironic provocation, a long laugh against the cult of meritocracy and excellence, but also against the petulant aestheticization of failure with a protagonist who turns against himself with a tenacity that ends up being tender.
This novel with its short ironic sentences, as precise and withering as aphorisms, is a comic, devastating satire on a generation’s existential philosophy, and with that, on the future promise of contemporary society.
English sample translation available