Cape £18.99 pp400

Horrible things happen to many of the women in this story but it’s difficult to believe in or care about their distress. Lolo, a 40-year-old designer in an unnamed Spain, has vowed “to hide from the true horror of the world in the company of the fairer sex”. His first wife becomes a recluse, obsessed with coupling bodies as “pure geometric symbols”. The second kills herself after being repeatedly raped. A girlfriend dies from “bleeding to death by making love all night”. Among these gratuitously lurid happenings, the infertile Lolo’s sudden longing for a daughter seems implausible and misplaced.

One problem is the vague portentousness of his narrative. References to “the Capital city” and the “Old Ones” and “the Condition” (Lolo is falsely diagnosed as HIV-positive by a mischievous doctor friend) evoke nothing with their coy upper-case letters except a wearisome echo of Kafka. Indeed, despite Lolo’s assertive rejection of books as signs of naive idealism, he’s altogether too literary. Sauntering along a Mediterranean beach, “under the common sun”, preoccupied with thoughts of a “Moor” and a dead “Mother”, he sounds uncomfortably like Camus’s outsider.

Some episodes are finely written and read truly — for example, Lolo’s childhood wish for a model aeroplane or the prolonged macabre death of his father. Too many others are overloaded with graceless symbolism. His drunken fiancée lowering her naked buttocks onto a dead uncle’s face, a nameless girl groping inside another for a used condom, fireworks with silly names such as Time of the Month add little. Countless sentences end with an unnecessary exclamation mark. The book is rather like that, claiming a thrill that it hasn’t earned.

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