Monstrosity, Flesh, and Allegory: On Alberte Momán’s Lapamán
There are books that seem to emerge from the depths of a wound, texts that do not so much narrate as exude — words written with saltwater, blood, and desire. Alberte Momán’s Lapamán (Ediciones Atlantis, 2018) belongs to that rare breed. It begins on a rocky Galician shore with an act of self-gratification and violence, and from that grotesque genesis rises a creature that is neither man nor mollusk, neither human nor other. The hybrid protagonist, who takes his name from the very beach on which he was conceived, becomes the unstable center of a narrative that fuses sexuality, social alienation, and political paranoia into a single, disturbing organism.
From its opening pages, Momán’s novel declares itself as a provocation against the comforts of genre and realism. There is no familiar point of entry, no promise of psychological verisimilitude or redemption. Instead, we are thrown into an ecosystem of viscera and absurdity, of metamorphosis and surveillance. Lapamán reads at once like a grotesque fable and a contemporary parable of the human condition — a text that dares to imagine consciousness emerging not from spirit or intellect, but from the slow, painful transformation of flesh itself.
The birth of the amphibian: between Kafka and Genet
The book opens with a passage that could have been written by a coastal Kafka. The narrator, an unnamed voice that seems to coincide with the creature itself, describes its origin in sentences dense with erotic unease: a man masturbating against the rocks, the scraping of shells, the mingling of human semen and sea life. From this obscene contact, the being that will become Lapamán is born — a being with both shell and skin, gills that harden into lungs, extremities that gradually assume human shape.
This metamorphosis is not a magical event but a biological allegory. Momán treats the process with a cold zoological precision, but also with a lyrical irony. The mutation is slow, painful, and grotesque — an inversion of evolution, as if humanity were being reimagined backwards, not as the culmination of species but as an error of adaptation. “I grew,” the creature recalls, “without being aware that my appearance was not that of a mollusk of my species.” What he becomes is an anomaly: a hermaphrodite amphibian with a human body and a shell that must be periodically filed down to fit into social life. His struggle for mobility — dragging his carapace through the sand, trying to walk upright — becomes the novel’s first metaphor of consciousness: the body as prison, the world as reef.
If Kafka’s Metamorphosis depicts the absurdity of becoming vermin in a bourgeois household, Momán’s version reverses the dynamic. His creature does not descend from man to insect but ascends, painfully, from the sea to the city, from animality to self-awareness — and with that awareness comes desire, shame, and loneliness. The hybrid body becomes both a symbol of sexual difference and of exile. To be human, in Lapamán, is to be perpetually half-formed.
The pornography of existence
Lapamán’s first encounter with the human world occurs through pornography. Emerging from his coastal solitude, he stumbles upon a group of tourists filming a pornographic movie on the beach. The scene, at once comic and horrifying, stages the moment when the body enters the economy of the gaze. Drawn by the camera’s light “like a strange will-o’-the-wisp,” the creature approaches, is discovered, and, in the confusion, becomes part of the film. His immense phallus, previously a natural appendage, is now framed, lit, and commodified.
The absurdity of the situation — the mollusk-man cast as a porn actor — would verge on the ridiculous if Momán did not treat it with such a sense of tragic inevitability. Lapamán’s sexuality, far from liberating, is a curse; his pleasure is violent, his touch destructive. In one of the book’s most disturbing scenes, a porn shoot turns fatal when the protagonist, overwhelmed by desire, kills his partner through penetration. The description is merciless, almost clinical, a choreography of pain and anatomy. There is no moral judgment, only the cold logic of the event: the body has exceeded itself, the instinct has devoured the subject.
Pornography in Lapamán is not an industry but a metaphor for the world — a structure that transforms life into spectacle, flesh into image. The camera, the hotel, the sheets, the cigarettes — all recur as symbols of a civilization addicted to its own reproduction. What Lapamán embodies is not perversion but exposure: the impossibility of existing without being seen, consumed, or punished for being visible. In this sense, Momán’s novel owes as much to Pasolini’s Salò as to the surrealist grotesque of Genet or Bataille: it turns the erotic into an act of political revelation.
From body to labor: alienation and the factory
After his brief notoriety as a pornographic curiosity, Lapamán slips into another kind of servitude. He meets Joe, an investigator whose very name is “a typographical error” — a detail that sums up the novel’s tone of absurd tragedy. Joe recruits Lapamán as an informant in a textile factory, promising easy money and anonymity. The mollusk-man thus becomes a spy, an infiltrator, a cog in an invisible war.
The factory sequences, among the novel’s most remarkable, reconfigure the industrial space as an extension of the organism. Conveyor belts, forklifts, and mechanical rhythms mirror the muscular contractions of Lapamán’s own body. The workers speak in trivialities — football, family, lotteries — while violence simmers beneath the surface. In a men’s bathroom, Lapamán witnesses an act of bullying against a timid worker named Lucas, a figure of pure vulnerability who will later become both friend and lover. The scene encapsulates the book’s world: humiliation as the basic unit of social order.
Through this microcosm, Momán constructs a vision of capitalism as pornography by other means. The factory’s logic is the same as that of the camera: everything exists to be used, to produce, to be recorded and discarded. Lapamán, once a creature of the tides, is now trapped in another kind of tide — the circulation of goods, information, and bodies. The sea has become a warehouse.
Violence as system
The novel’s middle sections unfold like a nightmare of interrogations. After being betrayed by Joe and attacked by unknown agents, Lapamán is drugged, tied to a chair, and beaten under a blinding light. The scene repeats, almost ritualistically, later in his own apartment, where a different faction tortures him for information he doesn’t possess. The effect is both claustrophobic and philosophical: violence without ideology, punishment without guilt.
Momán writes these passages with an uncanny neutrality. There is no melodrama, no crescendo of emotion, only the monotony of pain — the rhythm of power itself. “The sound of metal sliding through its rails entered his subconscious,” the text reads, “as if he himself were flowing through them.” Torture becomes a form of language, the only communication possible in a society that has forgotten how to mean.
At the center of this labyrinth stands the mysterious name “Alamut.” It surfaces during one of the interrogations, evoking the historical fortress of the Assassins, but here it designates a clandestine network of mercenaries working for and against the system simultaneously. Joe’s eventual monologue reveals the perverse symmetry of the world: there are no sides, only feedback loops. “We all belong to one model or the other,” he says, “even without wanting to. Our acts position us.” The insurgents and the corporations are mirrors; both depend on violence to sustain their order. Lapamán, caught between them, becomes the expendable interface — the body through which ideology materializes.
The language of flesh
One of Momán’s most radical gestures lies in his prose itself. Lapamán is written in a language that refuses purity. The syntax undulates, like something half-alive; sentences stretch, break, and coagulate. The vocabulary oscillates between anatomical precision and lyrical delirium. Reading it feels like being submerged — not in narrative but in substance. The words cling to each other as shells do to rock, creating a surface both rough and luminous.
This style situates Momán within a lineage of European writers who have sought to recover the body as the origin of meaning: Bataille, Artaud, Genet, and, closer to our time, Elfriede Jelinek. But unlike those predecessors, Momán’s voice carries a distinctly Atlantic resonance. His Galicia is not only geographical but ontological: a place of fog, humidity, and salt, where the boundary between human and nonhuman is perpetually dissolving. The sea, always present, functions as both womb and grave — the ultimate metaphor for a world in constant flux.
Momán’s background as a poet is evident in the rhythm of his prose. Paragraphs breathe like stanzas; repetition creates an incantatory effect. Yet the poetry never aestheticizes the horror. Instead, it amplifies it, turning every sensory detail into a moral question. How much violence can language bear before it collapses? How can we speak of the body without betraying it? Lapamán answers by refusing to separate ethics from texture: the reader must feel the words as much as understand them.
Gender, hybridity, and the queer grotesque
To call Lapamán a novel about gender would be reductive, but impossible to avoid. Its protagonist, described explicitly as hermaphroditic, experiences sexuality as both gift and curse. His dual anatomy — penis and vagina coexisting — becomes a metaphor for the permeability of identity itself. The erotic scenes with Lucas, written with equal tenderness and brutality, refuse to fit any conventional taxonomy. Desire here is neither heterosexual nor homosexual, neither domination nor reciprocity; it is an event of transformation, an eruption that dissolves the boundaries between bodies.
In this sense, Momán’s work participates in what scholars have termed the queer grotesque — a mode in which monstrosity exposes the artificiality of norms. Like Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus or the performances of Genesis P-Orridge, Lapamán treats the body as a text under revision. Its shell, periodically filed down to pass among humans, becomes a perfect image of gender performativity: the painful labor of appearing normal. Yet unlike the celebratory tones of much contemporary queer theory, Momán’s vision remains tragic. The hybrid cannot escape his condition; adaptation is mutilation. To survive is to lose.
Politics without redemption
If there is a philosophy underpinning Lapamán, it is one of radical disillusion. The novel’s world admits no center, no moral vantage point. Every structure — sexuality, labor, rebellion — reproduces the same violence it seeks to escape. Joe, the investigator, and the nameless torturers are part of the same machinery; Alamut and the State mirror each other’s tactics. Even the tenderness between Lapamán and Lucas cannot endure. By the final pages, what remains is exhaustion: a consciousness aware of its entrapment, a shell worn smooth by the waves.
Momán’s refusal to provide closure may frustrate readers accustomed to narrative payoff, but it is precisely this openness that gives the book its integrity. The ending — fragmented, delirious, half-hallucinatory — leaves Lapamán walking through the city as if through a dream, perceiving everyone as complicit in a reality they cannot perceive. The revelation is not external but internal: awareness as curse. “He felt small,” the narrator tells us, “like a speck of dust at the mercy of a current playing against him.” It is a line that could describe not only the protagonist but the reader after closing the book.
Lapamán in context: Alberte Momán’s literary vision
For those familiar with Alberte Momán’s broader work — his poetry collections such as As que dormen sobre a palla and Raro, or the prose experiment La realidad difusa — Lapamán appears as a crucial node in an evolving aesthetic project. Across his oeuvre, Momán has explored marginality, identity, and the porous boundary between the real and the symbolic. What distinguishes Lapamán is the way it synthesizes these obsessions into a single allegorical figure. The mollusk-man is at once the poet’s avatar and his critique of authorship: a being who writes himself through transformation, who carries his own armor yet is never protected by it.
Momán’s writing also dialogues with the Spanish and Galician traditions of the grotesque. There is something of Valle-Inclán’s esperpento in the way he distorts reality to reveal its moral decay, but his tone is darker, less satirical. The humor, when it appears, is black as pitch. Beneath the absurdity lies a metaphysical despair reminiscent of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms or the disembodied narrators of António Lobo Antunes. Yet the setting — the coastal, industrial, half-forgotten Galicia — roots the novel in a precise sociopolitical landscape: the ruins of labor, the collapse of utopia, the detritus of globalization. The sea that once offered sustenance now delivers only corpses and plastic.
Why Lapamán matters
In an era when much contemporary fiction favors psychological realism, marketable trauma, or moral transparency, Lapamán stands as an anomaly. It refuses empathy, coherence, and redemption. Its characters do not learn, heal, or transcend; they mutate, suffer, and vanish. The book’s audacity lies precisely in that refusal — in its insistence that literature can still confront the unspeakable without explaining it away.
Momán’s novel reminds us that the grotesque, far from being a relic of modernism, remains one of the most truthful forms of writing about the twenty-first century. The hybrid body, the porous border, the commodified self: all are images of our own condition. The pornography of labor, the surveillance of intimacy, the fragmentation of language — these are not exaggerations but mirrors. In that sense, Lapamán’s monstrosity is our own reflection, seen through the distorting glass of art.
At its deepest level, Lapamán is a meditation on what remains of the human once all transcendence has been stripped away. What happens when identity is no longer anchored in morality, when consciousness is only another mutation of matter? Momán’s answer is bleak but oddly liberating: meaning survives only as residue, as the echo of resistance that persists in the act of writing itself. To tell this story — to give language to what should not exist — is already to assert a kind of life beyond the system.
Conclusion: the beauty of decay
Reading Lapamán is an unsettling experience, like touching something alive and cold. It demands attention, even complicity, from its reader. One does not consume this book; one endures it. Yet beneath its surface of abjection and cruelty lies a fierce, almost sacred lyricism. The rhythm of the prose, the density of its images, the precision of its metaphors — all reveal an author who believes, against all odds, in the power of literature to disturb, to awaken, to corrode.
Alberte Momán has written a novel that resists interpretation even as it invites it, a book that transforms the grotesque into revelation. Lapamán may be about a hybrid creature born from a shell, but what it truly depicts is the metamorphosis of language itself — the moment when words shed their human skin and crawl, gasping, toward another form of life. Few works in recent Spanish or Galician literature dare so much, or risk so completely the loss of beauty in pursuit of truth.
To read Lapamán is to be reminded that literature’s task is not to reassure but to unsettle; not to represent the world, but to mutate with it.
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