By Salvador Elizondo
Translated by Joshua Pollock
ISBN: 9781628974386
Publication Date: 9/6/2022
Originally published in 1968, a cult classic of Mexican literature is available in English for the first time.
In The Secret Crypt, Elizondo's impassioned, breathless prose launches the reader into a labyrinth that is also a hall of mirrors. Here, we find a small group of characters who are part of an underground sect called Urkreis, one of whose aims is to discover the identity of the sect's founder, known only as "the Imagined." The identities of the narrator, author, and characters blur into one another as the narrative moves between the two worlds of the novel and the author writing the novel--an unclassifiable masterpiece containing initiation rites, sacrificial murder, conspiracy, and delirium.
Praise for Farabeuf
"One of Mexico’s most fascinating literary creations." —Dermot F. Curley, The Drama of Writing
"Highly experimental and unapologetically demanding." —Structo Magazine
Biographical Information
Salvador Elizondo(1932-2006) was a Mexican experimental novelist, poet, and critic. His works include Farabeuf, or the Chronicle of an Instant (1965), The Secret Crypt (1968), The Graphographer (1972), Elsinore: A Notebook (1988), and Theory of Hell (1993). He won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 1965 for his first novel, Farabeuf o la crónica de un instante, and was awarded the Mexican National Prize for Letters in 1990.
Joshua Pollock is a poet and translator. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.