Stay This Day and Night With Me

January 16, 2023
Spanish writer Gopegui explores the relationship between humans and AI in her thoughtful English-language debut. Mateo, 22, applies to a college program at Google and enlists the help of Olga, an older woman who owns a small tech company. He’d begun an application sometime earlier, he tells her, and receives regular emails from an AI bot who encourages him to finish, prompting Olga to suggest they write an application that will get the attention of an actual person. The rest of the narrative consists of their letter to Google, which often digresses into philosophical questions about existence informed by literary references (“All people who exist are alike, the ones who don’t exist don’t exist each in their own way”). Interspersed with these musings are scenes of Olga and Matteo hashing out their ideas in Olga’s apartment, with moments of tension as Matteo considers a cyber attack on Google, which Olga puts the brakes on. Gopegui leavens the high-mindedness with a cool sense of irony, and shines with her succinct insights on the similarities between humans and AI (“health apps that turn people into toasters”). Readers will be intrigued.

January 1, 2023

Shortly after 22-year-old student Mateo runs into sexagenarian mathematician Olga in the public library, he asks her to help him fill out an application for a job at Google. Instead of the customary r�sum� and cover letter, however, they collaboratively prepare an unconventional paper application; their written transcript and the report of the Google intern recruiter that comprise this book give a metafictional effect to its structure. Ultimately, however, Olga learns she has a fatal incurable disease and travels to Switzerland to deliver the application, but Mateo stays behind, leaving in doubt the execution of his plan of violent revenge against Google. The static narrative flits back and forth between the meager plot and essay-like digressions and metaphysical discussions. Their Socratic method of conversation focuses on topics relating humankind to technology such as the epistemological nature of each and the commonality of communication and connections between them. VERDICT Spanish screenwriter/novelist Gopegui (The Scale of Maps) relies on an intergenerational discourse defending Google's avowed altruist purpose against a not very harsh or convincing criticism of its dehumanization, but the often tedious dialogues that serve as mouthpieces for these opposing views lack verisimilitude.--Lawrence Olszewski

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2023
Two unlikely futurists co-write an unusual application to Google. Spanish screenwriter and novelist Gopegui's latest fiction employs a strange conceit: It's ostensibly a job application letter to Google written by the book's protagonists, 60-something Olga and 22-year-old Mateo. The letter forgoes any accounting of its authors' qualifications and instead recounts how the two came to write the strange application after meeting at a library. What passes for plot in the novel transpires almost exclusively through Olga and Mateo's winding conversations about robots, machines, algorithms, free will, and the future. While these philosophical exchanges walk the line between tedious rambling and mesmerizing contemplation, the book's more interesting moments occur when the narrators apostrophize Google to varying effect, at one point nearly beseeching the tech giant like a deity: "In Mateo's house the barrages of water rush in without you even noticing." Other times, the two assert the limitations of their finite digital overseer: "The world, Google, is still filled with conversations you can't see." The understated action takes a more urgent turn when it's revealed that Mateo has hidden a homemade bomb in his storage room, but this drastic revelation is undercut by Olga's facing a life-threatening condition. As Mateo notes, even such a dangerous device is minuscule compared to "the inevitable disappearance of loved ones." Timely, contemplative metafiction that overrelies on the amusing, if quickly exhausted, charm of its conceit.

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