A Midsummer Night's Babel
By Julián Ríos
Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Richard Alan Francis
Paperback: 9781628977080
eBook: 9781628977097
Publication Date: June 22nd, 2027
Description
First published in Spain in 1983 and proclaimed “an instant postmodern classic” (Encyclopedia Britannica), Larva is a rollicking account of a masquerade party in an abandoned mansion in London.
Milalias (disguised as Don Juan) searches for Babelle (as Sleeping Beauty) through a linguistic funhouse of polylingual puns and wordplay recalling Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A mock-scholarly commentary reveals the backgrounds of the masked revelers, while Ríos’s punning and allusive language shows that words, too, wear masks, hiding an astonishing range of further meanings and implications.
Larva’s tale, a reassessment of the Don Juan myth in our time, is told in single-minded pursuit of double meanings, but it is serious play. It revives a Hispanic tradition repressed for centuries by introducing the Madhatter English tradition of puns, palindromes, and acrostics, by creating Joycean echoes and pushing language to its maximum connotative capacity. Larva has been praised by such leading Spanish-language writers as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, and Severo Sarduy, and establishes Ríos as the most accomplished successor to Joyce.
Biographical Note
Julián Ríos is Spain’s foremost postmodernist writer. He was born in Galicia in 1941 and educated primarily in Madrid. His best-known work is Larva, an experimental novel that has been the subject of many studies. During the seventies he was an important publisher, creating and running the Espiral collection of Fundamentos, a Madrid publishing house. The collection included books by Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and Severo Sarduy. A contributor to various magazines, both Spanish and foreign, he currently lives in France, on the outskirts of Paris.
Having translated Manuel Puig, Julio Cortazar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and other notable authors, Suzanne Jill Levine is one of the most highly regarded translators of contemporary Latin American literature. She is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the author of The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction.