Description

Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a voodoo prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean – and humanity – from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was – with the help of a sacred anemone.Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art. Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it’s a restless, addictive trip: The Tempest meets the telenovela.

Publisher Review

`Rita Indiana is fearless and brilliant and Tentacle is her finest novel, an unforgettable experience.' Junot Diaz'Indiana is truly a renaissance woman. Not only is she one of the most exciting Dominican authors in recent years, she is also a musical force to be reckoned with. [...] She's one of those rare artists whose music you can either dance to or sit down and listen to as if it were a great novel.' Alt.Latino, NPR.org`Reads like an extended song. . . . So fast-paced that it must be swallowed whole, for setting it aside is as dangerous as jumping from a speeding motorcycle.' El Pais on Papi ---- `Rita Indiana is unclassifiable. Tentacle is a kind of pulp fiction for educated classes, a wild but carefully conceived combination of sci-fi adventure, art-world-cum-hipster-satire, eco- and socially-aware thriller, with a work of Caribbean studies breaking in from the side. It works. The tone is cool and nonchalant. The characters achieve that; the author never intrudes between them and us ... When the denouement comes it is brutal and irresistibly attractive.'Judith von Sternburg, Frankfurter Rundschau ----`Merengue star Indiana knows how to get things dancing. Her literary tricks come from the oral traditions of voodoo and Santeria. Many of Tentacle's characters are reincarnations of earlier lives and linked to those lives. In this way she infects the visible world with the invisible world.' Ralph Hammerthaler, Suddeutsche Zeitung ----- `Rita Indiana is comfortable with the language of modern technology, but her joy in storytelling, the effervescence of her imagination and the way she wraps stories within stories are all firmly part of a Latin American tradition: Tentacle recalls important works from the sixties like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.' Eva Karnofsky, Deutschlandfunk Radio ---- `A great novel. There's so much in it: the history of the Dominican Republic, politics and of course religion. Music is referenced, and biology, conservationism too, and it's full of wit, thanks to the way Rita Indiana tells it.' SWR2 Radio ---- 'A fasten-your-seat-belt, strap-on-your-crash-helmet novel of magic, time travel, art, buccaneers, ecological disaster, and more. Unlike any dystopian novel you've read, Indiana pushes and stretches the form like an octopus working its way through a maze to pose fundamental questions about gender, identity, and society. This book should make Rita Indiana a literary superstar.' Josh Cook, Porter Square Books, Boston, MA, and author of An Exaggerated Murder ---- `Tentacle reaches back and forward through the ages, harnessing the fluidity of time, gender, and the natural world to reflect on colonial history and imagine a deeply disturbing future. [...] Obejas's English version certainly captures some of that vernacular feel, mobilizing US slang as well as Spanish syntax and vocabulary, reminding readers that while this is a story with a global vision, it has a Caribbean setting.' - Ellen Jones, Los Angeles Review of Books ---- `An electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision.' - Tor.com ---- `Tentacle shapeshifts dizzyingly around three time spans and a loosely connected group of characters, and takes on huge themes, including race and gender, the impact of tourism, apocalyptic events and ecological disaster. [...] Whether we would really want to change the past, given the opportunity, is one question posed in this blast of a novel; what it is to act beyond self-interest is another. Tentacle reads like Kathy Acker with a tighter narrative grip.' - Suzy Feay, The Guardian ---- 'Where to begin? Rita Indiana's Tentacle has the settings, themes, and expansiveness of a much larger book, but it blends that ambition with a host of irreverence (along with some nods to the music of Giorgio Moroder, which is never a bad thing). It's a time-travel story, a meditation on gender and sexuality, and an art-world satire-as well as, arguably, a satire of `chosen one' narrative tropes. To say that this is unlike anything else you'll read this year is probably stating the obvious.' - Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders ---- 'From beginning to end, Tentacle is a strange, unnerving, and at times beautiful book that critiques global inequality and the politicization of climate change.' - Amy Brady, Chicago Review of Books ---- 'Tentacle is not a book that produces catharsis. It is the opposite. It is a book that demands reflection from its reader and then, hopefully, action. [...] The cruelty of the past is also that of the present - a reality ensured by those who cling to power and its many cloaks: white supremacy, misogyny, and transphobia. If the future is to be different, it will be up to the marginalized and to those who are willing to disinvest in privilege. Our planet's future rests quite literally, the novel suggests, with the fate of the oppressed.' - Kristie Soares, Los Angeles Review of Books ---- 'Tentacle is as strange and beautiful a sea-change as its epigraph from The Tempest suggests ... Achy Obejas brings the volume to English language readers with a social burja-cyborg flare - at once witchy, almost shamanisitically intuitive about the nature of language, and yet precise.' - Alexandra Marracini, Times Literary Supplement