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A Novel
by Sebastian Castillo
After a year of self-imposed exile, a young writer attends a New Year's Eve party in hopes of reconnecting with old classmates in a blackly humorous tale set on a single snowy night.
After experiencing a mysterious heart-related health scare, our narrator, Sebastian Castillo, who shares his name with this book's author, resolves to spend a year alone in self-imposed exile, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos.
But come New Year's Eve, Sebastian will break his expulsion from everyday life by accepting an invitation to the home of a former philosophy professor for a reunion with his cohort, one decade after graduating. This invitation surely would have been ignored if not for the promised attendance of Maria, Sebastian's former classmate and love interest. What follows is an inexplicable series of fascinating events charting the erosion of young, bookish hope.
Fresh, Green Life is a meditation on literature, education, and philosophy, a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future, and a compact miracle of the fake-real.
"Castillo skewers various forms of malarkey in this sharp tale of a cerebral man's quest for self-improvement...The engrossing narrative explores questions about how one should lead, or change, one's life. Fans of Thomas Bernhard will find much to love." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[A] combination of highbrow references and deadpan comedy clicks resonantly throughout the book, and admirers of Thomas Bernhard's work will find plenty to savor here. The gulf between the narrator's intellectual ideals and lived reality...gives this short novel plenty of energy. Castillo navigates an emotionally fraught narrative with empathy and dry humor." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Castillo's hypnotic, funny, and wonderfully surprising novel, an exemplary example of autofiction, wraps up the reader and takes them on a fascinating journey." —Booklist
"Exposing the thin lines between discipline and vanity, rigor and pretension, discourse and isolation, Fresh, Green Life is a surreal, compulsively readable portrait of a disenchanted scholar. Castillo writes with humor and humility, masterfully endearing his fictional counterpart to the reader as his hero seeks the 'delicious nonsense' of his school days and a reason to break his yearlong vow of silence. Fresh, Green Life is a disarming, absorbing, and singular novel." —Emily Adrian, author of Seduction Theory
"Our narrator in Fresh, Green Life, one 'Sebastian Castillo,' is a contemporary anti-hero, a descendent of Underground Man and Zama—neurotic, pretentious, and willfully lonely, a minor fraud and struggling academic, an adorably wretched idealist—who asks us, as we spend a few hours in the 'life-world' of his mind, to consider the gap between passivity and action, between genius and stupidity, and what it might mean to live our philosophy. A hilarious and unpredictable novel." —Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
This information about Fresh, Green Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sebastian Castillo is a writer and teacher living in Philadelphia. He was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and grew up in New York. His work has appeared in New York Tyrant, Peach Mag, Electric Literature, Joyland, Epoch, BOMB, and elsewhere. He is the author of 49 Venezuelan Novels, Not I, SALMON, and The Zoo of Thinking.
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