The Sky Over Lima
'A beautifully written novel' - André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2014 OJO CRÍTICO LITERARY PRIZE
AN OFFICIAL SELECTION OF THE FESTIVAL DU PREMIER ROMAN IN CHAMBÉRY
A vibrant tale of literary seduction, set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century Peru
Peru, 1904. José Gálvez and Carlos Rodríguez are poets. Or, at least, they’d like to be. Sons of Lima’s elite in the early twentieth century, they scribble bad verses and read all the greats, especially their idol Juan Ramón Jímenez, the Spanish Maestro. Desperate for Jímenez’s latest work, unavailable in Lima, they decide to ask him for a copy.
Convinced Jímenez won’t send two dilettantes his book, but he might favour a beautiful young woman, they write to him as the lovely, imaginary Georgina Hübner. Jímenez responds with a letter and a signed copy. Elated, and now the talk of their literary circle, José and Carlos write back. Their correspondence continues as the Maestro falls in love with Georgina, and the boys abandon poetry for the pages of Jímenez’s life.
Set against the vibrant backdrop of bohemian taverns and social unrest in Peru at the turn of the century, The Sky Over Lima is being hailed as the most assured and inventive literary novel to come out of Spain in years.
'A beautifully written novel, chock-full of sharp humor and penetrating insight' Andre Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first novel, B rcena draws on a real-life literary hoax to craft an intriguing tale of transatlantic catfishing. Carlos, the introverted son of a vulgar rubber baron, and Jos , the swaggering scion of one of Peru's most illustrious families, are two rich friends who fancy themselves poets, "playing at being poor in a Lima garret." On a lark, and in hopes of securing a copy of his latest book, they strike up a correspondence with the Spanish poet and the real-life future Nobel Laureate Juan Ram n Jim nez, by posing as an earnest, besotted young woman, Georgina. Jim nez takes the bait, and so twice a month a ship carries letters between the imaginary muse and the pining poet, missives that miraculously escape the clutches of the boat's letter-gnawing rat. As Georgina becomes the protagonist of a serial epistolary novel within Barcena's novel, the young men struggle to flesh her out: whom to model her after, what to reveal and what to conceal, and what genre her story will ultimately belong to. The self-referential novel drives home, a little too insistently, the fictional nature of life and romance: "everything is literature... the entire world is a text constructed of words alone." However, B rcena grounds the literary games in a richly detailed, early 20th-century Lima and its cast of secondary characters: dock workers, prostitutes, caf -haunting literati. Its lightly ironic tone darkening as it proceeds, the novel sensitively explores how a literary prank shapes the sentimental, romantic, and moral education of Carlos, the more genuine of the two fraudsters.
