The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

By Carlos Rojas

Book Overview

A modern Spanish masterpiece by one of the most extraordinary novelists of our time

"As intelligent and audacious a meditation on art, fate and mortality as anyone could hope to read." --Los Angeles Times

In Carlos Rojas's imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico Garc a Lorca, murdered by Francoist rebels in August 1936, finds himself in an inferno that somehow resembles Breughel's Tower of Babel. He sits alone in a small theater in this private hell, viewing scenes from his own life performed over and over and over. Unexpectedly, two doppelg ngers appear, one a middle-aged Lorca, the other an irascible octogenarian self, and the poet faces a nightmarish confusion of alternative identities and destinies.

Carlos Rojas uses a fantastic premise--Garc a Lorca in hell--to reexamine the poet's life and speculate on alternatives to his tragic end. Rojas creates with a surrealist's eye and a moral philosopher's mind. He conjures a profoundly original world, and in so doing earns a place among such international peers as Gabriel Garc a M rquez, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and Jos Saramago.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300205864
• ISBN13: 9780300205862
• Release Date: April 2014
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.9"