Life Is A Swift Flight to Nowhere: The Self and Its Faces in Llegaron (They’ve Arrived) by Fernando Vallejo

Abstract

Llegaron (2015), Fernando Vallejo’s latest novel, is categorised as one of his autofictional novels. It resumes the dialogue that the textual self establishes with the otherness that characterises his writing. The relationship with the otherness is presented in his work as the access to indiscernibility areas along with the heterogeneous minority: childhood, the animals, and the dead. Language becomes an opposition to the prevail- ing doxa in the aesthetic, political, and ethical planes, and it enables the rise of new faces, strange and demonic, through a writing that is presented as a hospitable and welcoming space for otherness.