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...
This volume brings together three short novels by Catalan literature's great maverick and recluse, each depicting a brutal, abstract world where wo...
First published in 1936, and considered one of the most groundbreaking and significant novels written in Catalan, "Waltz" tells the tale of an idle, introspective, and somewhat oblivious young "man without qualities" as he stumbles through a milieu of civic upheaval and bourgeois tragedy, waltzing from one prospective bride to another, never willing to compromise his ideals, and so never quite becoming an adult. With one foot in the romanticism of Goethe or Kleist, and another in the wildly differing takes on the modern novel provided by Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust,...
First published in 1936, and considered one of the most groundbreaking and significant novels written in Catalan, "Waltz" tells the tale of an idle...