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Philosophical Toys
‘A prose both spare and lush, a commendable tension about the enterprise’.
Will Self
‘The wisdom of Philosophical Toys should be graced.’
Ambit
‘A tremendously restless vision which relentlessly traverses genres and styles.’
Ruben H and Monica Bergos, 3:AM Magazine
‘A cult and thoroughbred writer.’
Marisol Laviño, Proscritos
‘Susana Medina’s teasing tale leads us into a labyrinth of interlinked questions, an echo-chamber of deceptive answers. Rather like the fetishism that is its guiding thread, the novel operates an endless deferral of meaning through a series of bewitching substitutes. The quest to understand the possibly shoe-centred relationship of her parents plunges the narrator into adventures, encounters and reflections – in both senses – that encompass ghost-writing and forgery, orthopedics and vagina dentata, Buñuel and Freud, amid visits to nursing homes, the art world, S&M clubs and toyshops.
Like her narrator, Medina is a Spaniard in London whose rich yet unfathomably offbeat language voices a mix of satire, comedy and philosophy propelled by a disarmingly down-to-earth plot involving bedsits and money worries. This is ultimately a story about tenderness, for both people and the objects they live through; a novel of ideas rooted in the senses, glittering, strange and humane.’
Lorna Scott Fox, London Review of Books
‘Her personal profile reveals a writer but most of all a writing. A singular writing, a unique voice that leads us through a labyrinth that is dark and yet under a luminous sky: the expressive naturalness, the narrative will, the humour, an audacity that rejects experimentalism and an erudite undertone that rejects pretension, all give clarity to her prose.’
Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia
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Philosophical Toys, chapters 1-3
'The sex-appeal of the inorganic', 'Mona Lisa’s demonic laughter' &
'My mother’s resurrection'
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Philosophical Toys, chapters 4-6
'A cellar in a loft', 'The paradise of forgetfulness' &
'The snowing dream'
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Philosophical Toys, chapters 7-8
'Leather-bound stories' & 'The penis nightmare'
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Philosophical Toys, chapters 9-11
'The dehumanisation of artists', 'The museum of relevant moments'
& 'Anything strang'
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Philosophical Toys, chapters 12-13
'The money kindergarten' & 'Any meaning can be
attached to anything'
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Philosophical Toys, chapters 14-15
'Childhood trance interlude' & 'Pearl, Snow and the insistence of
the fetish'
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Philosophical Toys, chapters 16-17
'Anima blandula days' & 'A double full stop'
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Philosophical Toys, chapters 18-19
'Mortality sucks' & 'The cloning passion, a sort of footnote'
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Philosophical Toys, chapter 20
'The ubiquitous lullaby'
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A cellar in a loft
(chapter 4)
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The money kindergarten
(chapter 12), published in Ambit, n 177
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A tale about an extraordinary mind whose face is printed on Austrian bank notes
(micro-tale at the end of chapter 8) published in Ambit, n 177
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