The Gravity of Flesh and Silence: On Alberte Momán Noval’s Bondage

There are writers who approach the act of narration as a way of clarifying the world, and there are others who write to thicken its shadows. Alberte Momán Noval belongs decisively to the second category. His fiction and poetry, from the corrosive minimalism of Lapamán to the diffuse, philosophical textures of La realidad difusa, have built a private laboratory of perception, a place where matter, desire, and moral ambiguity collapse into one another. Bondage (2024) extends that exploration into an even darker and more intimate territory: the architecture of submission—personal, political, and metaphysical.

Momán’s novels have always balanced on a razor’s edge between realism and hallucination. They are written in the language of industry and flesh, of clandestine work and bodily exhaustion. The author’s background in visual arts and design has given his prose an uncommon spatial sensibility: his pages seem constructed rather than written, built of textures, of weight, of temperature. In Bondage, that sculptural attention to environment becomes the essential engine of the narrative. It begins, characteristically, in motion—beneath a massive pipeline carrying heated whey, in the nocturnal fringe between labour and illegality. The opening scene is less an introduction to a plot than an immersion in a material world vibrating with pressure and danger. From there, the novel expands outward and inward simultaneously, threading together scenes of theft, sexual domination, industrial decay, and cosmic exile into a single, pulsating meditation on the limits of control.

To read Bondage is to enter an atmosphere of contamination. The protagonist—anonymous, itinerant, and self-absorbed in the ethics of his own degradation—moves through a landscape where commerce and the body have merged into the same circuit. Momán’s narrative is built like a series of confined chambers: a pipeline, a bar, a kitchen, a spacecraft, a mine. Each section corresponds not only to a physical space but to a stage in the disintegration of consciousness. The rhythm is precise and cold; the transitions are abrupt yet strangely seamless, as if the text itself were obeying the mechanical flow of the fluids it describes.

Momán has often explored the intersection of addiction, labour, and metaphysics. In As que dormen sobre a palla, the decay of a post-industrial Galicia became the mirror for a collective moral collapse. Bondage returns to that same tension, but removes it from any recognizable social realism, pushing it toward the speculative and the grotesque. The trafficking of the mysterious substance “S2” becomes not a simple criminal act but a reflection on the commodification of salvation itself. What happens, the novel asks, when even the cure for alienation is absorbed by the market mechanisms that produced it? The answer, as always in Momán, is neither cynical nor moralistic; it is anatomical. He does not moralize about capitalism—he lets it seep into the pores of his characters until it becomes indistinguishable from their libido.

Each of the novel’s ten sections functions like an experiment on the human condition conducted in an airless laboratory. In the early chapters, we find the protagonist engaged in the underground trade of the S2 serum, a liquid that allegedly turns torment into domestic virtue—a pharmacological miracle that transforms dysfunction into obedience. Later, we witness how this traffic dissolves into absurd comedy and, eventually, into cosmic exile. The tone oscillates from noir-like introspection to grotesque eroticism and, finally, to a visionary science-fictional delirium. The shifts are not arbitrary; they reproduce the logic of addiction, where each new high must exceed the last in order to sustain the illusion of coherence.

One of Momán’s most distinctive traits is his ability to fuse philosophical speculation with a tone of deadpan irony. In Bondage, that irony becomes a weapon against both sentimentality and despair. The novel’s characters speak with the lucidity of those who have lost faith in language. The dialogues, when they appear, are brief, almost liturgical; they expose the absurdity of everyday speech in a world where every gesture is already commodified. The prose remains stripped to the bone, devoid of ornament yet charged with rhythm. Sentences flow with the measured cadence of a mechanical heartbeat. There is no room for psychological depth in the conventional sense, only for behaviour—pure, reflexive, physical behaviour that betrays the moral exhaustion of the species.

The domestic scenes are among the most disturbing in Momán’s entire oeuvre. The relationship between the protagonist and his partner, defined by rituals of sexual domination and verbal silence, serves as a grotesque allegory of submission in late modernity. The novel’s title, Bondage, thus resonates on multiple levels: erotic, economic, existential. The woman’s presence—half lover, half tormentor—extends the novel’s meditation on agency. She embodies the paradox of power under neoliberalism: even rebellion becomes a form of servitude when desire itself is shaped by the structures it seeks to resist. Momán refuses to moralize this dynamic. Instead, he records it with the clinical precision of a scientist noting the behaviour of cells under stress.

Yet Bondage is not content to remain a claustrophobic chamber drama. Around its midpoint, the narrative ruptures. The private hell of the couple expands into an interplanetary exile. The protagonist, caught in the political consequences of his illegal trade, is deported to Ryugu—a distant asteroid reimagined as the new frontier of human exploitation. This sudden leap from domestic realism to cosmic dystopia might seem jarring in another author’s hands, but in Momán’s it feels inevitable. The industrial and the interstellar are merely extensions of the same logic: both operate through extraction, control, and depletion. The mines of Ryugu mirror the emptied bodies of the characters; both are reduced to instruments of production, their interiority vacuum-sealed by the ideology of efficiency.

The novel’s second half abandons almost all conventional realism. The texture becomes increasingly abstract, and the narrative voice, once confined to the protagonist’s pragmatic consciousness, dissolves into a collective murmur. We move through the corridors of spacecraft, through dream sequences that fuse erotic memory with technological nightmare. There is a haunting sense that humanity itself has become obsolete, that the characters are only remnants of a species whose emotions have been automated out of existence. The “programme” described in the latter chapters—an institutionalized system of neural suppression—is Momán’s most chilling invention. Here the human being is perfected by subtraction: liberated from pain, from desire, from moral conflict, and thus from meaning. The irony is devastating. The utopia of efficiency becomes indistinguishable from death.

What sustains the reader through this descent is Momán’s control of tone. His prose has the detachment of a report and the cadence of a prayer. Even when describing scenes of extreme violence or erotic excess, he avoids sensationalism. The horror emerges precisely from the neutrality of the gaze. This composure gives Bondage a paradoxical beauty—its austerity becomes a form of lyricism. The absence of affect creates its own kind of emotion, one that seeps in through the edges of the text like radiation.

Throughout his career, Momán has written against the comfort of narrative closure. His fiction ends not with revelation but with exhaustion. In Bondage, that exhaustion becomes thematic. The novel is structured as a slow fading of consciousness: from the sensory overload of the opening pages to the abstract numbness of the final ones. The protagonist’s journey—from smuggler to miner, from erotic subject to mechanical object—maps the trajectory of a civilization that has mistaken functionality for salvation. In that sense, Bondage is not merely a dystopia but a metaphysical parable about the disappearance of the self under the weight of systems.

What distinguishes Momán from other European experimentalists is the coherence of his vision. His universe is one of moral entropy, but it is rendered with absolute formal precision. The recurring motifs of fluids, conduits, mechanical rhythms, and decaying bodies form a kind of symbolic grammar that extends across his entire oeuvre. Each novel adds a new layer to that architecture. In Lapamán, the sea was a site of return and dissolution; in La realidad difusa, the mind itself became an unstable landscape; in Bondage, the body and the machine fuse into a single organism. Reading his work chronologically, one senses a movement from the local to the cosmic, from the social ruin of Galicia’s industrial peripheries to the cosmic desolation of Ryugu. But the moral coordinates remain unchanged: what is at stake is always the possibility of meaning in a world governed by economic, technological, and affective exhaustion.

Despite its philosophical density, Bondage is not an intellectual exercise. It is deeply physical. Every scene is grounded in tactile sensations: heat, pressure, sweat, viscosity. The eroticism is not gratuitous but ontological—it defines what it means to exist in Momán’s world. The body, continually violated and reconstituted, is both the victim and the medium of revelation. When, in the later chapters, human contact is replaced by mechanical repetition, the loss is not merely sexual but existential. To be human, in this novel, is to endure friction. The abolition of friction—the dream of perfect order—marks the end of experience itself.

Momán’s refusal to separate the political from the erotic gives Bondage its subversive charge. The novel exposes the continuity between systems of domination that are usually kept apart: the control of the body, the exploitation of labour, the management of desire. Its characters are trapped not by tyrants but by the invisible logic of normalization. In that sense, Bondage speaks directly to our present moment, when autonomy is marketed as lifestyle and pleasure is indistinguishable from compliance. Yet the book resists the comfort of moral clarity. There are no heroes, no victims—only participants in a system that absorbs every form of resistance. The protagonist’s partner, with her ritualized cruelty, is as much a product of this system as he is. Their exchanges are not scenes of rebellion but of mimicry, echoing the sadomasochistic dance between subject and power that defines modern life.

The speculative sections, set on Ryugu, amplify these themes through allegory. The mining colony becomes a grotesque mirror of Earth’s economic order, where bodies are optimized for productivity and memory is erased for efficiency. The “programme” that gradually transforms workers into emotionless machines is presented with chilling pragmatism. There is no need for overt violence; submission is achieved through design. The result is a community of perfectly functional beings who have forgotten what it means to feel. The final image—ambiguous, suspended between awakening and annihilation—suggests that liberation, if it exists, lies only in the capacity to imagine one’s own extinction.

What makes Bondage remarkable is its ability to fuse philosophical abstraction with narrative momentum. The novel is relentless, yet never opaque. Its structure—alternating between dense monologue and cinematic scene—creates a rhythm that draws the reader through layers of meaning without ever offering the illusion of resolution. Momán writes like a filmmaker editing fragments of different realities into a single hallucination. The result is hypnotic: a fiction that feels less read than experienced.

In the context of contemporary Spanish and Galician literature, Momán occupies an unusual position. He belongs neither to the mainstream of psychological realism nor to the self-consciously avant-garde tradition. His work is both regional and planetary, intimate and theoretical. It carries the residue of the industrial ruins of northern Galicia, but transforms that local desolation into a universal allegory of late modernity. Few writers have managed to articulate so convincingly the convergence between economic precarity, technological alienation, and the erosion of desire. Bondage crystallizes all those concerns into a single, haunting composition.

If there is a lineage to which Momán can be compared, it might include writers like J. G. Ballard, Elfriede Jelinek, and the late Don DeLillo—authors who understood that the language of power is written not in slogans but in the texture of the body. Yet Momán’s voice remains distinct. His prose, simultaneously ascetic and visceral, refuses both satire and transcendence. He writes from inside the system, tracing its logic to the point of collapse. In doing so, he reveals a kind of tragic serenity: the recognition that freedom may consist not in escape but in the lucidity of knowing that escape is impossible.

Bondage is not an easy novel to love. It resists empathy, rejects consolation, and offers no catharsis. Its beauty lies in its discipline—the way it maintains composure amid the chaos it depicts. Like the best works of contemporary dystopian fiction, it does not describe the future; it exposes the present under a different light. The pipelines, the bars, the apartments, the mines, the spacecraft—these are not metaphors for alien worlds but precise descriptions of our own.

In the end, what remains after reading Bondage is a sensation of density, as if the air itself had thickened. The novel closes not with an ending but with a suspension, a breath caught between mechanical survival and the faint memory of desire. That suspended state, that ambiguity between function and feeling, is perhaps Momán’s truest subject. Across his entire body of work, he has returned again and again to that moment where consciousness recognizes its own confinement and yet refuses to disappear.

With Bondage, Alberte Momán Noval confirms himself as one of the most singular voices in Iberian literature—a writer who dares to imagine the moral consequences of our technological and emotional automation. His prose, stripped of ornament and compassion alike, forces us to confront the question that underlies all his fiction: what remains of the human once all the systems designed to protect it have succeeded?

In the silence that follows the final page, the reader may realize that the answer was there from the beginning, vibrating beneath the pipeline, in the hum of the compressor, in the breath that still insists on naming itself alive.