Attila
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- 75,00 kr
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- 75,00 kr
Publisher Description
"My life will not make any sense when Attila is finished," declared Aliocha Coll about his mesmerizing final novel. In this groundbreaking "untranslatable" work, he channels Joycean experimentalism to explore the fragility of empires, the future of the city, and the weight of legacy.
Attila the Hun, reimagined as a visionary leader, contemplates the fate of his people at the gates of Rome. His son, Quijote, is caught between empires and ideals, forced to choose between his father's vision of a Hunnic utopia and the decaying allure of Roman civilization. As Rome burns, Quijote journeys through both real and surreal landscapes, encountering psychedelic visions, mystical revelations, and existential dilemmas.
Quijote's journey blurs the lines between past and future, uniting Biblical, Classical, and Buddhist traditions while moving between planes of existence. Attila is an intricate and elusive masterpiece from the explosive and disorienting imagination of Aliocha Coll, where characters from myth and history intermingle in a stunning labyrinth of allegory and metaphor.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coll (1948–1990) offers a literary riddle for the ages in this gorgeous 1991 novel, his English-language debut. Fragments of plot arise and dissipate over the course of the mysterious narrative, set mainly in the fifth century, as Coll tracks a love affair between Quixote Historia, son of Attila Historia, leader of the Huns, and Ipsibidimidiata, daughter of Rome's ruler, who is also named Rome. Attila invites his son back to the mythical Hun capital of Etzelburg to divide the empire's hostages. Instead, Quixote and Ipsibidimidiata go to Rome, where Quixote takes an administrative role in the imperial government. After receiving a vision urging him to travel to his father in the heart of the Asian steppe, Quixote takes Ipsibidimidiata on an epic journey across Eurasia. All the while, a spectral cast of characters drawn from religion and myth—King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, Specter of Absalom, Antigone, and Laocoön, among others—appears intermittently, offering gnomic pronouncements ("‘The lovers' garden... bulges lethally"). More than its sequence of events, the novel is propelled by its unique prose, thrillingly translated by Whittemore: "Disturbing and anemophilous plasticity, how could one not understand this town's mystic suicides, pierce yourself and reside in the rhythms." This dazzles.
