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Locos: A Comedy of GesturesAuthor: Felipe Alfau American Literature Series December 1988 224 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 paperback / cloth, 1-56478-171-2 / 0-916583-30-9 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.36—20% OFF! 
$19.95
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Book Description
The interconnected stories that form this novel 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 my almost heroic opposition."
First published in 1936 and long neglected, this elegantly inventive novel anticipates works like Pale Fire and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Locos, Felipe Alfau creates a mercurial dreamscape in which the characters—the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy—wrench free of authorial control, invade one another's stories, and even turn into one another.
About the Author
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Felipe Alfau was born in 1902 in Guernica, Spain. He emigrated to the United States during World War I, where he studied music and wrote music criticism for a brief period for La Prensa, the Spanish newspaper in New York. Deciding to write in English because he felt he could not reach a Spanish audience, in 1928 he completed Locos, which took eight years to find a publisher. Meanwhile, in 1929, he published a children's book, Old Tales from Spain. After the publication of Locos, Alfau worked in a bank in New York City as a translator and wrote one other novel, Chromos. Chromos was not published for more than half-century after it was written, but was a finalist for the National Book Award when it was finally released. |
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Praise
"You keep reading this hypnotic novel the way a sleeping person wants to keep dreaming."—Publishers Weekly"This is a work as much about fiction's creation of places outside time as about the antics of madmen."—Times Literary Supplement
"Recent readers have compared Alfau not only with Nabokov and Calvino but with Garcia Marquez and Borges."—New Yorker
"A vastly satisfying book . . . I enjoyed every moment of his dark and lively tale."—Saturday Review
"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, lascivious 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
"It's the stuff of Lorca, Dali and Picasso as the interrelated cast jostle for body space in the interlocking tales that form the novel, exchanging identities as croupier Alfau shuffles the pack of human wreckage. . . . A lovely, funny book, completely 'loco.'"—Time Out