Locos
A Comedy of Gestures
Published on 29. January 1998
Book
Paperback/Softback
206 pages
978-1-56478-171-0 (ISBN)
Description
The interconnected stones that form Felipe Alfau's novel LOCOS take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young 'author' "For them", he complains, "reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply love it and make for it against ray almost heroic opposition" Alfau's "comedy of gestures" -- a mercurial dreamscape of the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy -- was written in English and first published in 1936, favorably reviewed for The Nation by Mary McCarthy, as she recounts here in her Afterword, then long neglected.
Reviews / Votes
"You keep reading this hypnotic novel the way a sleeping person wants to keep dreaming." - Publisher's Weekly"Alfau's inventive 'comedy of gestures' is, like any hall of
mirrors fun house, disorienting, maddening, and greatly entertaining. It
has everything any modern best-seller needs: murder, incest, fallen
priests, Iascivious nuns, a couple of suicides, several mysteries, the
living dead, pimps and whores and poets, locales that shift from China
to the Philippines to the Caribbean to Europe." - Washington Post
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Normal, IL
United States
Product notice
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 142 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
340 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-56478-171-0 (9781564781710)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a short-story writer, bestselling novelist, essayist, and a social and art critic. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, she was the author of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Venice Observed, and Birds of America, among other books.