This volume brings together three short novels by Catalan literature's great maverick and recluse, each depicting a brutal, abstract world where words are the only reality--shifting between the erudite, the archaic, and the vulgar. "Carrer Marsala," which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya--neither of which Bau bothered to accept--is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with dental hygiene, sex, and his own squalid rooms in Barcelona. In "The Old Man," the narrator observes a strange building where a decrepit prisoner is ritually beaten by a policeman once a week. "The Warden" details the narrator's own captivity, and his relationship with the woman who keeps him prisoner. In Martha Tennent's haunting translation, reminiscent of a Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, Miquel Bau 's work is a pungent reminder of the ways the world fails its prophets and pariahs.
Les mer
This volume brings together three short novels by Catalan literature's great maverick and recluse, each depicting a brutal, abstract world where words are the only reality---shifting between the erudite, the archaic, and the vulgar.
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781564787316
Publisert
2012-08-09
Utgiver
Vendor
Dalkey Archive Press
Vekt
340 gr
Høyde
203 mm
Bredde
145 mm
Dybde
23 mm
Aldersnivå
01, G
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
149

Forfatter
Oversetter

Biographical note

Miquel Bauca (1940-2005) was perhaps the most radical stylist, iconoclast, and visionary in Catalan literature: eschewing publicity, insulting his peers, and writing unclassifiable books. Today he is seen as a cult figure, and his works as contemporary classics. Francesc Trabal was born in Sabadell, Spain, in 1899. He contributed to numerous magazines from an early age, and was a centrally important author, editor, and journalist for the Catalan community before being forced into exile after the Spanish Civil War. He died in Santiago, Chile, in 1957.