Metafiction—writing that references its own composition—is an integral feature of a large swath of twentieth-century literature. This is particularly true in the hispanophone and southern European literary traditions, including such writers as Miguel de Unamuno, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Carmen Martín Gaite, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco. The word itself entered into widespread usage in English after William Gass introduced it in 1970, and the concept quickly became a useful way of categorizing a wave of so-called postmodern novels that, as the story went, were determined to call attention to their own status as fiction.[1] For many, metafiction was a sign of a decadence, an inward turn novelists took when they ran out of stories to tell about the real world. The wave swelled between the early 1960s and late 1980s, and subsequently the mode fell somewhat, though never completely, out of fashion.
Thomas Bunstead’s translation of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Book of All Loves (published originally in Spanish in 2022) offers an occasion to consider this form and its contemporary relevance anew.[2] Mallo’s novel, which contains within it another book about different kinds of love whose composition the narrative describes, is an especially good case study, because it’s clear that Mallo does not consider metafictional layering an aim in itself—a narrative trick designed to showcase his compositional expertise. Nor does he treat it as the means to a didactic end—a convenient device to, say, comment on the state of the novel or on literature more broadly. Instead, Mallo’s book within a book expresses a coherent philosophical outlook, which holds that everything that exists—if you examine it closely and imaginatively enough—looks and acts alike, and can be made to stand in for, or inside, everything else. This startlingly monist vision of the universe, we might say, is fractal, and Mallo’s presentation of it is prolific and unrelenting.[3] At times it’s overwhelming. Ultimately, however, it expresses a difficult, necessary, endlessly fascinating apprehension that the experience of love and the spirit of critique operate in cognate and interconnected ways.
About half of The Book of All Loves consists of a collection of densely gnarled philosophical notes about various kinds of love. These small essays are intercalated with excerpts of an intimate, though highly abstract, dialogue set after a so-called “Great Blackout.” The other half of the novel comprises a narrative about a couple in Venice who live unknowingly in the shadow of a coming apocalypse (presumably the same Great Blackout). One partner is a Latinist; the other, the writer of a book about love, which we can infer is the philosophical text mentioned above. As such, The Book of All Loves contains three storylines weaving together scenes, conversations, and ideas from a world both pre- and postapocalyptic. It’s a heady mix. Each storyline operates in a surrealist register, full of optical illusions and impossible objects. One paragraph imagines a scenario where shadows do not point in unison away from the sun but are instead scrambled in an array of orientations. Another passage reads like a rendering in dialogue of the famous Escher print showing two hands in the act of endless cocreation:
“When I pick up pencil and paper, I am unable to draw my hand without it also being yours.”
– he says.
“And this valley has the same shape as the floor of the ocean that once covered it.”
– she says. (94)
The logic of her response mimics the logic of his observation about the identity of their hands: the valley has the same shape as the ocean floor that once covered it, because it is the ocean floor that once covered it. Several objects from the Venice storyline operate more like philosophical thought experiments than actually existing things. The linguist buys a perfect “vinyl sphere” composed of records that stack perfectly into one another’s grooves, which the couple eventually plays as a kind of soundtrack to the Great Blackout. The writer buys a snow globe containing St. Mark’s square, at the same time as the real-life square has mysteriously become a snow globe-like vacuum of smells and sounds. All three storylines are rife with such doublings and triplings, such fractaline multiplications.
These illusions, impossibilities, and echoes combine to produce a sense of vertigo; Newtonian laws of physics seem not to apply. Over the course of the novel, Mallo employs metafictional nesting to heighten these vertiginous effects. As we read, it repeatedly dawns on us that the speaking couple is probably a version of the couple in Venice, and that the inset book about love is probably the book we see the woman writing. The connections between the different storylines are never explicit, so we have the opportunity to remember them periodically as we read. This remembrance involves a disorientation at the level of scale; the difference between the container and its contents is thrillingly effaced. The experience is complex, a mixture of the shock of alienation, the pleasure of recognition, and the paranoid sense that there are many other correspondences across the narrative yet to be found.
The sense of the storylines’ interconnectedness is especially acute in the inset book about love. This book within a book is a set of theoretical observations about how certain aspects of the world look like and express others—a view which is largely conveyed by a litany of extended metaphors, with love acting as both the object of comparison and binding agent, the glue that allows all comparison to operate. Each paragraph has a neat, parenthetical title at the end, such as: “Apophenia love,” “Present love,” “Neutralization love,” “Unrecordable love,” “Test-tube love,” “Urban love,” “Advert love,” “Mandible love,” “Angel of AI love.” Scientific or social analysis and varied articulations of love, from the romantic to the cosmic, are juxtaposed in order to illuminate one another. As we read these fragments—reminiscent of Roland Barthes as much as of John Barth—seemingly minor, innocuous subjects are shown to express major, significant features of human life. And we experience again the sense that Mallo is showing us different versions of the same insight over and over: that describing any particular element of the world stands to reveal something about both the operations of love and the operations of history. The experience of moving between the storylines and the experience of reading them individually are, then, made to match in a kind of scalar homology.
The inset book about love is difficult, but remarkably patterned. Most paragraphs begin with an imposingly cerebral analysis of some facet of the natural or social world. These analyses then typically wind their way toward a significant inversion, contradiction, or reversal, and eventually culminate in a final observation about love. Structurally akin to Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, and drawing frequently from Freud, these paragraphs skewer together different layers of biological, social, political, economic, psychic, and emotional life with wildly imaginative leaps and comparisons. “Bifurcate love,” for instance, begins with the fact that snakes, pigs, and boars can use their forked tongues and dual nasal holes to sense from which direction a smell may be coming. Humans, despite our two nostrils, cannot. Mallo uses this difference to set up the passage’s closing remark about the ancient Greek notions of eros and agape (carnal and non-carnal love, respectively), together “a bifurcate kind of love that we lost at some point in history, along with the capacity to orientate ourselves emotionally” (22). In this passage, we learn something about our concept of love by considering the evolution of our noses, the latter providing a comparative figure for the former. The passage also demonstrates in microcosm the overarching project of the whole inset book of all loves. “Bifurcate love” laments the consequences of having lost the ability to distinguish two kinds of love; the inset book is intent on reviving just that ancient ability. Instead of dividing love back into only two kinds, however, Mallo offers as many as he can.[4]
If in individual entries such as “Bifurcate love” love appears as a discrete object of comparison, across the compendium love is also the shared substance allowing for comparison itself. Everything, looked at closely, is an avatar of love. “In the case that a Last Judgment did exist,” Mallo writes, “it could only be arbitrated by the one truly final thing we know, love. Love would be witness, prosecutor, defense, accused, and judge” (89). The passage then closes by connecting this mystical perspective of love’s ubiquity to more quotidian romantic life: “Carefully considered, this is a way of describing the theatre of every breakup – the comedy of judgment – acted out by the lovers” (89). Particular lovers are embodiments of Love with a capital L, omnipresent and all-pervading.
Mallo’s vision of love as a shared, all-pervading substance feels, in moments, a bit facile—the stuff of a new age spiritualism. But this feeling never lingers long, as other entries in the inset book derive their observations about love from incisive analyses of social life. One passage muses on “Economicus love,” opposing an ideal kind of love—which “consists in choosing someone from among the millions of people on the planet, segregating that person in order to ascribe virtues to them that only you can see, contemplating a marvel where the rest of the planet sees only statistics and ordinariness”—to “the kinds of negotiations required by friendships and love on social networks [that] arise out of a skill set barely different from that required by company to maintain and increase its profits” (121–22). Mallo contrasts an easily cooptable and commodifiable kind of love with a radically different sort grounded in an aesthetic capacity to “marvel.” Other paragraphs consider consumer culture, species death, economic crisis, and technology, using love as a launching pad to talk about the state of the world, and vice versa. “Gender Abundance Love” begins by noting that “this science we call economics exists and makes sense only in a world where resources are scarce,” and from there detects love in various kinds of abundance, appearing as a “gender abundance” that moves beyond the “binary,” and as quantum computing, which moves beyond “the two poles of one and zero” (20). Here—and in opposition to generalized impoverishment—love is explicitly expressed as “abundance”; the novel, in its ongoing compendium of loves, enacts an abundance of its own.
At one point, Mallo seems to concede that it’s relatively easy to make the kinds of connections he does. Tying off a paragraph distinguishing beach sand (round) from quarry sand (jagged), and noting the structural uselessness of the former, he writes:
What we have just said, anybody could convert into a metaphor for a multitude of different things. One could look no further than conflicts between governmental powers (cement) and the citizenry (grains of sand). Or than love. It’s so easy, it isn’t even worth doing. (Sand love) (168)
We might find this moment unsatisfying. Isn’t it precisely the writer’s job to sift such expanses of metaphorical potential for the most illuminating use of the comparison? That Mallo doesn’t follow through here, however, is not simply a shirking of poetic duty. He is explicitly telling us about something he’s been showing all along: the fact of metaphorical ubiquity. With the right glasses on, everything is potentially something else. For most of the book, Mallo (or his writerly stand-in) seems to be in earnest pursuit of that potential. He sees love operating everywhere, and he’s committed to pointing it out. One consequence of such a plentitude of correspondence is that the comparisons can lose their aura, their sense of meaningfulness. And at times, Mallo’s litany of loves does begin to feel too easy. We learn his moves. But if other books might have avoided that feeling by more conscientiously curtailing the quantity of comparisons made, Mallo deliberately proliferates them until the book cracks under their weight. In the note on “Sand love,” he momentarily—as if to catch his breath—gives up. In that pause, we recognize that what the inset book of all loves gives us is less a collection of useful metaphors (some memorable, others too opaque or convoluted to be remembered) than a philosophy of life as metaphor. This philosophy is simultaneously expressed by and helps justify the broader metafictional arrangement of which it is part.
Over time, we feel that these individual comparisons matter less than the impulse to make them. The plotted portion of the novel indicates two causes for the eruption of this impulse. The first is personal. The author of the inset book of all loves has just lived through a temporary separation from her partner. Her relentless metaphorics are therefore born out of something like heartbreak, however much they cover their sentimental tracks (there’s one mention of divorce, but no detail clear enough for us to reconstruct a coherent romantic narrative). But the same metaphorical drive has other origins elsewhere. We know that the woman authoring that book does so in Venice, where, as Mallo reminds us, “the first bank cheque was signed and capitalism invented,” (95) and where, for reasons unexplained, people are now starting to lose their ability to see, smell, and hear. Society is in capital’s death grip, and it is breaking up. The woman’s notes see love everywhere, but they also trace processes of subsumption: the ways market logics take over existing aspects of social and economic life and subject them to new imperatives of property and profit. “You are the foetus of the big corporations. ‘Corporation’ comes from ‘corpus’ – yours,” she writes in one fragment. “What has been experienced is already done, definitively lost, or in the best case has become the property of others,” she writes in another (88, 79). The inset book of all loves and its drive to metaphorize, then, are made to the measure of a world in which pointing out the seemingly unstoppable subsumption of social life can only look like paranoia: once you start to look, you see it—and love—everywhere.
“Love” neither enables nor resists social corrosion and catastrophe, but tracks instances of both, in parallel. What The Book of All Loves gives us is a metafictional world made of metaphor. Mallo’s drive to create such a world is overdetermined. He does it because we’re citizens of an increasingly owned and crisis-stricken planet, and because our hearts are full and broken. The book that results is a difficult, dizzying, beautiful guide to the seemingly infinite kinds of love through which we experience the end of life as we know it—and the beginning of what comes next.
Notes:
[1] William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).
[2] There are other occasions. See, for instance, Alison Shonkwiler, “Financial Metafiction,” PMLA 138, no. 5 (2023): 1212–17.
[3] As Mallo has described Bunstead’s translation of his work: “the important thing in my stories are the metaphorical connections that are woven into a network, and to translate that you have to be very subtle and very sensitive to these processes and attuned to an analogical mode (they work by analogies and metaphors, not by syllogisms!).” Sebastián Sánchez, “An Interview with Agustín Fernández Mallo,” Asymptote, accessed August 26, 2025.
[4] Freud’s concept of “transference-love” is another model for Mallo’s proliferation of different manifestations of love.