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Ray of the Star
Hunt told The New York Times in July that he wrote his fourth novel over the course of “one mad six-week sprint” after visiting Barcelona, turning the city into an elaborate, sunny haunted house where the performance artists serving as living statues are indistinguishable from the ghosts inhabiting the town, so much so that whenever Harry, the protagonist, happens upon a new person, the reader is never sure whether that character is comprised of plasma or ectoplasma.
He also wrote each chapter as one long, tortuous sentence, threading each through commas and dashes and semicolons to reflect the fevered mind-set of Harry—who has fled to Europe after a death in his family—and the trippy, mystical nature of the city he finds himself poorly navigating until he meets a stranger named Irineo in a café, who reveals he’s obsessed with a woman who performs as a living statue, which triggers in Harry a longing for the same girl and a desire to enter her world by also assuming the role of living statue.
Reminiscent of Camus’s The Stranger, Ray of the Star gives little consideration to the death that has sent Harry reeling, though the way he’s easily sent in various directions by the people he meets hints at a numb, almost deranged wanderlust—the type of confusion that follows deep loss—and it’s this kind of slow burning mania that reminds also of Paul Auster; all of which proves that Hunt, even when on a mad sprint, has what it takes to create timeless efforts.
