Review: Super Extra Grande

Super Extra Grande by Yoss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I received an e-galley copy of this book from Edelweiss and Restless Books.

I was super extra excited to read this because Restless Books' last Yoss translation, "A Planet for Rent," was one of the best books I read last year. "Super Extra Grande" isn't quite up there, but it has different strengths. It doesn't have the emotional teeth as "Planet," instead showing off Yoss's comedy chops by dialing up the absurdity and dispensing with the colonialism allegory. Yoss knows how to build a functional, coherent SF world without going on at length. His universes are brightly colored with unusual (but logically consistent) working parts - think a world of Lego or K'nex.

Dr. Jan Amos Sangan Dongo (whose last name is a play on words that essentially means 'big') is a veterinarian - in space! He specializes in "super extra grande" creatures, giants from all planets. When we meet him, he's literally wading through shit as he walks through the bowels of a giant space whale. He's huge himself, for a human, and his previous two assistants (both beautiful women, for their species, who he had to fire because they were in love with him) were also incredibly tall. Sangan Dongo can't do anything small.

The book gets off to a slow start. Sangan Dongo wades through shit for a good third of the book, with many asides and reveries that give the reader background on this world. We learn that Spanglish is the universal human language. We learn that there are seven spacefaring species who all happened to discover interstellar travel at the same time. We learn that Sangan Dongo has always had an affinity for larger creatures - because in veterinary school, his size was a hindrance when working with the smaller animals - and the only giant species he has never worked with are laketons (so named because the single-celled organisms look like large lakes, and weigh tons). Once he gets out of the belly of the beast, he's sent into the belly of the beast again - to rescue his assistants, who have crash-landed (together!) on the home planet of the laketons. The plot wraps up as quickly as the beginning was slow, but altogether, it's a good ride. As I said before, the book is a riot, and it's a quick read, so if you have the chance to pick it up, do!

Personally, as a linguist who's currently in a lab focusing on bilingualism and code-switching, I'm fascinated by Yoss's (and the translator's) idea of what Spanglish will be in the future. I'd be really interested in seeing the changes Frye made in translation - what words did he switch from Spanish to English, and vice versa? Did he change the syntax? Because honestly, I don't know if I would've understood huge patches of the story if I didn't know Spanish, but it's also not in line with general patterns of Spanish-English codeswitching. One easy example: If you switch from Spanish to English in the middle of a determiner-noun pair, the determiner will almost always be masculine - you'll say "el fork" or "el spoon," never "la fork" or "la spoon," even though fork is masculine and spoon is feminine in Spanish. But "la (English noun)" occurs a lot here. So what does this sound like in the original Spanish to native Spanish speakers - like a natural extension of Spanish/English contact, or like some strange futuristic evolution of the two languages?

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