Guadalajara
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"A gifted writer, he draws well on the rich tradition of Spanish surrealism . . . to sustain the lyrical, visionary quality of his imagination."—New York Times
All the heroes of this story collection—the boy who refuses to follow the family tradition of having his ring finger cut off; the man who cannot escape his house, no matter what he tries; Robin Hood stealing so much from the rich that he ruins the rich and makes the poor wealthy; Gregor the cockroach, who wakes one day to discover he has become a human teenager; the prophet who can't remember any of the prophecies that have been revealed to him; Ulysses and his minions trapped in the Trojan horse—are faced with a world that is always changing, where time and space move in circles, where language has become meaningless. Their stories are mazes from which they can't escape.
The simultaneously dark, grotesque, and funny Guadalajara reveals Quim Monzó at his acerbic and witty best.
Quim Monzó was born in Barcelona in 1952. He has been awarded the National Award, the City of Barcelona Award, the Prudenci Bertrana Award, the El Temps Award, the Lletra d'Or Prize for the best book of the year, and the Catalan Writers' Award; he has been awarded Serra d'Ormagazine's prestigious Critics' Award four times. He has also translated numerous authors into Catalan, including Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway.
Peter Bush is a renowned translator from Catalan, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He was awarded the Valle-Inclán Literary Translation Prize for his translation of Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Monz (Gasoline) offers fresh takes on literary legends like Kafka's Gregor and Robin Hood in these darkly playful stories. In tidy prose, Monz embarks on pleasant narratives that swiftly prickle the hair on the back of the reader's neck: in "Family Life," nine-year-old Armand begins to wonder at the strange family ritual of chopping off a child's finger at the age of nine. Is it a barbaric custom or one that actually keeps the family together? In "Outside the Gates of Troy," the soldiers are crammed inside the giant wooden horse, doomed to wait for days before being approached by the Trojans, depleting their supplies and resorting to cannibalism. William Tell's grandson begs his father to re-enact the legendary event of their family ("Wouldn't he too like to join that world of heroes?"), to uncertain outcome; while Gregor the bug ("Gregor"), in a curious switch, wakes up as a fat boy. What if a student, in the middle of taking his exams, as in "Strategies," decides to fail on purpose, or if Robin Hood's altruistic stealing from the rich ("A Hunger and Thirst for Justice") only made the poor greedy and unjust? This collection possesses moments of delicious absurdity and bracing, dark irony.
