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.
Publisher: Dalkey Archive PressISBN: 9781564787316Number of pages: 149Weight: 340 gDimensions: 203 x 144 x 23 mm
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