An experimental book review I wrote about a novel a guy named Sebastian Castillo wrote about a guy named Sebastian Castillo who is not really a writer except in the sense of trying to write his own life, Quijote style

There’s surely levels to this shit: the writer Sebastian Castillo is a real person I am friendly but not friends with, and I draw that distinction knowing that we’ve exchanged direct messages on various message-capable platforms, and also exchanged various thoughts using our voices in various reading groups that have happened through just the one voice-sharing-capable platform, and also engaged in that sort of weird parasocial Twitter shit where I would see his very funny tweets and always end up thinking about that one he had about Jesus seeing all the sins in that garden from Christianity that starts with a G and I’m pretty sure I could recognize on the basis of it also being the name of the only Car Seat Headrest song off the newish album (The Scholars?) that I still listen to but just know I could never for the life of me spell, as I am pretty bad at spelling, a sin, I guess, that pales in comparison to many of the sins Jesus saw in the G garden from Christianity where he sees all the sins at once (Paul of Dune style), most famously, at least in the real person Sebastian Castillo’s tweet, some dude busting “rope” to Waluigi porn, a punchline that made me think, damn, real person Sebastian Castillo is pretty damn funny and interesting and stuff, and I wonder what he thinks when he sees me posting the kinds of things 26 to 28 year old mentally ill women post on their private Twitter accounts to deal with their excess mental illness, something that I no longer really have to wonder about because I am now 29 and I have solved mental illness so I can just sort of enjoy not and never knowing whatever real person Sebastian Castillo thinks about all that because I know that at this juncture in time, it doesn’t really matter for my real life, as we are just friendly and not friends, a distinction I draw on the basis of me not knowing how tall he is. I know his cat’s name because I asked once on one of those Zoom reading groups and he told me. He is subscribed to my newsletter and is probably asleep right now (10:21 PM Pacific Time), but will surely have an interesting life experience if he wakes up tomorrow and opens the email Substack will send tonight when I post this essay and he clicks the link and reads the essay.

I think Sebastian Castillo is an exceptional novelist amongst his peers in the traditionally published contemporary writing world because I think he understands that, fundamentally, the form of the novel is about having interesting life experiences. I think he understands this because – on the basis of having read his tweets, the novel Salmon, the short short story collection The Zoo of Thinking, and his most recent novel Fresh, Green Life — I have decided that I think Sebastian Castillo understands Don Quijote the character as much as he understands Don Quijote the novel, which is a lot. I don’t understand why you would be a novelist if you wanted to live a life that already existed, which is why I don’t understand most of his peers in the traditionally published contemporary writing world. Why commit yourself to the project of fiction if your only interest is in what already exists? This is to say, why — in your art and in your life — do only what is already being done?

To do what is not already being done you need to experiment, and I genuinely believe that Sebastian Castillo is one of the few genuinely experimental writers in the very small slice of the traditionally published contemporary literature world that I have read, which is not me being fake humble in the way many of the people in the traditionally published contemporary literature world are, something you can easily believe as you see the arrogance inherent in the shapes of my sentences; I just mean that there are a lot of books out there. Sebastian gets you have to do things differently for art though, I think, so here is an incomplete list of the things I am doing differently in this essay:

1. Not lying about anything.
2. Knowing that saying that makes you wonder what I am lying about and only smirking a little bit.
3. Writing this in one night (it is now 10:36 PM Pacific Time).
4. Publishing this as soon as I have reached what seems like the end of tonight’s thought and reading it through exactly once and only changing small things (I did change this sentence).
5. Not looking anything up.
6. Including one picture.

This and the other formal constraints I have set for myself I have done so out of respect for Sebastian Castillo’s most recent novel Fresh, Green Life, which is currently sitting on the shelf about one foot away from me and which, through what I believe to be a genuinely heroic exertion of willpower, I am not looking at compulsively to dismiss the obsessive fixation on the possibility that the book is actually titled Green, Fresh Life, which sounds worse so I doubt it, but man, wouldn’t that be embarrassing if I were someone who hadn’t already solved mental illness?

I don’t really think looking any of this stuff up would be actually more respectful to real person Sebastian Castillo’s novel than admitting that just like 20 minutes before right now, 10:42 PM Pacific Time, I was naked in bed under a weighted blanket poised to go to sleep after having earlier told my girlfriend that I was soooooo tired and just wanted to sleep but was not sleeping on the basis of being kind of obsessed with this idea of getting out of bed and putting on enough clothes to be ambiguously naked and opening my laptop and writing a kind of book review I am reasonably confident has never been written and I am more but not quite totally confident has never been published and doing all this using a bunch of rigid constraints I had set for myself in service of doing something totally unconstrained, which is what the character Sebastian Castillo does in the novel writer Sebastian Castillo wrote about the character Sebastian Castillo who, if I recall, sets a bunch of rigid constraints for himself in his life in service of trying to live it a different way, which is basically what it means to write a novel at the end of the day, which is why the character Sebastian Castillo is doing it Quijote style, and now I am too I guess, trying to live my life a different way, even though the biggest constraint I am facing at the moment isn’t formal but physical in the sense that I am typing using weird finger motions because for the first time in my life, my hands look like this:

Gender! I thought Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh, Green Life was a pretty interesting book about being a man because as a trans woman, cis men generally confuse me: here is a way to be alive that involves a lot of rigid constraints and yet instead of doing the literally radical thing and blowing up the root, you’re just kind of like, I fw the gym, which I get because before I blew up the root, I was fw-ing the gym, but then, you know, I blew up the root. Anyways, that seems to me like the way people generally relate to works of art, and so I’d like to see more criticism that approaches works of art this way — perhaps by taking on the aesthetic characteristics of the art, rather than simply pointing them out, an approach to criticism I will score points with fake Marxists for calling “immanent” — and I’d like to see less criticism that is about telling you what art is about, as I think that:

1. If I want to know what a work of art is about, I will consult the work of art.
2. I don’t like reading homework.

There’s one of those essays floating around where people review a bunch of different books in service of identifying a trend and then end up saying very little about the books and a lot more about the trend, which doesn’t make sense, because isn’t the whole thing about a trend that it’s popular enough to already be seen as such? Anyways, I never internalized the guy’s name or what publication it’s in so you’ll just have to figure it out from the fact that it’s about books about men and reads like homework.

(I’m really not supposed to say stuff like this in published writing, but I am self-publishing my writing because I am generally interested in doing something that hasn’t been done.)

And that’s what really got me out from under the weighted blanket and into this chair in my room and writing this essay where it is now 10:57 PM Pacific Time: I thought it was more respectful to Fresh, Green Life to write something genuinely experimental where I am just saying that I think Fresh, Green Life is a real novel in the sense that real novels all do the same thing, which is think about Don Quijote, the first novel. Please stop googling when The Tale of Genji came out or how to spell its authors name just to correct me and not feel like you’re racist for not knowing how to spell a Japanese name correctly in one go — The Tale of Genji is a work of long prose fiction, which is not a novel, as a novel is something I am here now defining as a work of long prose fiction that is dealing with the problem set out in the first novel, Don Quijote: what is the relationship between fiction and life?

I have only made it one and a half chapters into my ongoing first serious attempt to read Don Quijote in Spanish, although I have read it in English, so I will reserve more polished thoughts for another time and instead just say for now that on the basis of it literally getting me out of bed and staying in this chair until however many minutes the one read through and then publishing this takes past 11:03 PM Pacific Time, and also making me laugh and feel things, and also making me live my life a different way, my review of real person Sebastian Castillo’s 2025 novel Fresh, Green Life is that it is an exceptional novel.