Fresh, Green Life
Sebastian Castillo
Book Description
A study of interiority and inferiority, written in the vein of Lars Iyer and Ben Marcus, that takes place over the course of a single, snowy night
After resigning from an adjunct teaching position, our narrator Sebastian Castillo, who shares a name with our author, Sebastian Castillo, and also with a translated Spanish writer, Sebastián Castillo, resolves to spend an entire year without speaking, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos.
But, come New Year’s Eve, Sebastian (the narrator)—whose rich interiority in precontemplation alone is curiously and addictively easy to read—will break his silence by accepting an invitation to the home of a former professor for a reunion amongst 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, male hope.
In conversation with Rilke, Descartes, Kant, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, and others, Fresh, Green Life is a meditation on literature, academia, and philosophy; a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future; and a compact miracle of the fake-real.
Praise For This Book
"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
