Spanish Literature Series - Böcker

Exiled in Tangiers, cut off from home and country, the narrator of Count Julian rants against the homeland he was forced to leave: Spain. The second novel in Juan Goytisolo's trilogy (including Marks of Identity and Juan the Landless), this story of an exiled Spaniard confronts all of Goytisolo's own worst fears about fascist Spain.

In the late '60s, Juli?n R?os began work on what would have been his very first novel, but fearing that it wouldn't pass the stringent Spanish censorship under Franco, decided not to submit the completed book to publishers. Soon distracted by what would be his magnum opus--the "Larva" series--the manuscript was set aside and forgotten, until the author found and dusted it off almost fifty years later. Quite unlike his later postmodernist work, the short and bitter "Procession of Shadows" is filled with stories of love, war, and vengeance, focusing on the tiny, remote village of Tamoga--a place where vendettas are passed down from generation to generation, and where violence has left its traces in every corner. A "Winesberg, Ohio" for the end times, "Procession of Shadows" shows us a very different side of the usually playful R?os: dark, direct, and pitiless.

In "Exiled from Almost Everywhere," Juan Goytisolo's perverse mutant protagonist--the Parisian "Monster of Le Sentier"--is blown up by an extremist bomber and finds himself in the cyberspace of the Thereafter with an infinite collection of computer monitors. His curiosity piqued, he uses the screens at hand to explore the multiple ways war and terrorism are hyped in the Hereafter of his old life where he once happily cruised bathrooms and accosted children. Ricocheting from life to death and back again, meeting various colorful demagogues along the way--the imam "Alice," a pedophile Monsignor, and a Rastafarian rabbi--our "Monster" revisits seedy democracies that are a welter of shopping-cities and righteous violence voted in by an eternally duped citizenry and defended by the infamous erogenous bomb. At once fantastical and cruelly real, "Exiled from Almost Everywhere" hurtles the reader through our troubled times in a Swiftian series of grisly cartoon screenshots.

A prismatic and erotic novel of the intersection of multiple worlds, this is the first novel by Roberto Bolano's early writing partner A. G. Porta to be translated into English.

When his marriage and career fall apart, a young lawyer sets out on a desperate mission to recapture the promise of his youth. His attempt leaves him stranded between a past he no longer recognizes and a life that’s no longer his—and he soon begins to suspect that the surest path to happiness lies in simply giving up. A moving, tragicomic novel about defeat, memory, and the seductive prospect of losing it all.

Four pairs of stories-four “double rooms”-sit side by side in the latest work of fiction by one of Spain’s most compelling writers. A publisher wonders about the voices that haunt her; a scriptwriter receives an unexpected gift; a dinner party is shaken by a mysterious guest; a father seeks to atone for his son’s crimes. Ranging from Madrid to Milwaukee, and from prose fiction to drama to essay, the chapters of this “narrative installation” echo one another, revealing a carefully layered composition of humor and foreboding. Double Room is a subtle meditation on the bonds between parents and children, the burdens of illness and grief, and the places we make our home.

Recounting: Antagony, Book I surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The novel follows the youth and education of Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism. The novel’s potent drama plays out through Goytisolo’s crisp, forceful presentation of youth, humor, optimism, rebellion, violence, sexual awakening, indulgence, punishment, and the realization of one’s artistic vocation. Alternately modern and historical, Recounting displays intelligent realism, emotional gravity, profane beauty, brute vulgarity, sweeping rhetorical scope, and seamless transitions through long, streaming passages of narrative and introspection.

This potent drama, a collected volume of Goytisolo's famed tetralogy following a Catalan family, is widely regarded as one of the most profound inquiries ever undertaken on literary creation. Antagony surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The work, originally published as a tetralogy and now collected into one volume, follows the youth and education of Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism. Its potent drama plays out through Goytisolo’s crisp, forceful presentation of youth, humor, optimism, rebellion, violence, sexual awakening, indulgence, punishment, and the realization of one’s artistic vocation. Alternately modern and historical, Antagony displays intelligent realism, emotional gravity, profane beauty, brute vulgarity, sweeping rhetorical scope, and seamless transitions through long, streaming passages of narrative and introspection.

A Spanish-gothic version of a Patricia Highsmith novel Jon and Katharina spend the winter in Jon’s childhood home on the Cantabrian coast, lonely and bored, ambivalent about their precarious freelance jobs and disconnected in their relationship. Yet the couple’s routine will soon be disturbed when one rainy night, they witness strange lights in the sky over the village. The next morning, ufologists begin to arrive in the village, anxious to make extraterrestrial contact. The morning brings other unexpected guests: Jon's distant cousin, Markel, and his companion, the silent, alluring Virginia. The visit becomes increasingly uncomfortable as—like the ufologists camped out in view of the house—the strangers stay on and show little sign of planning to leave. Days stretch into weeks, even as the cousins can't remember ever having met, Virginia’s behavior becomes subtly threatening, and Jon begins doubt that Markel is who he says he . . .  A deliciously tense and darkly humorous novella that explores the border that separates love from routine and offers a twist on theme of “the other” and how to live with the unknown, The Strangers introduces English readers to singular talent.

A mysterious character from the city arrives at a peaceful country village, attracting the interest of Josu, a young adolescent. José Luis, the newly arrived vicar, is the ideal mentor for any rebellious boy with a curious heart. More comfortable sneaking around and spying on people from the rooftops than playing with others in the mud, Josu delves into the memories of the newly arrived vicar’s troubled past.Julio José Ordovás’s skillfully woven and fearless narrative tells of an unlikely friendship between two rebellious characters at different times in their lives. His debut novel promises an unrestrained, uncensored narration, leaving nothing untold. Taken from the adult Josu’s perspective, this nostalgic narration demonstrates the author’s striking ability to present a spectrum of human emotions with distinct ironic undertones.

At a New Year’s Eve party, a dead woman turns up alive again, after passing through a mysterious post-mortem way station located on another planet, and much to the disbelief of her old flame, who interprets the night’s events with the help of his reading of Kafka. A priest is sent by the Vatican to investigate a strange development in the American cattle market: a breed of cows identical in all physical respects to human women. A man leaves his wife and flees to the north of Spain, where he meets a sickly woman in an empty café, introduces himself as Jorge Walser, and makes plans with her to disappear. Aboard a trans-atlantic cruise, a door-to-door vacuum salesman bumps into a woman who appears to be Natassja Kinski, and they swap tall tales as the ship floats them asymptotically toward world’s end. Christ turns out to be a girl who fronts a punk band. The words of such writers as Beckett, Walser, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Bolaño, Kafka, Blanchot, and Borges are characters in themselves.The Irish Sea is a novel masquerading as a book of short stories. A meditation on the paradox of nostalgia, which always seems to pine for what never was. A fevered search for order through writing, of truth through literature, of the nodal point where life and literature intersect. A strange personal gallery curated by a razor-sharp reader and his other, unknown self.

Sonia meets Knut in an online literary forum and begins a long-distance relationship with him that gradually turns to obsession. Though Sonia needs to create distance when Knut becomes too absorbing, she also yearns for a less predictable existence. Alternately attracted to and repulsed by Knut, Sonia begins a secret double life of theft and betrayal in which she will ultimately be trapped for years.