Felipe Alfau (Book order)

Felipe Alfau Book order

August 24, 1902 – January 1, 1999

Felipe Alfau was an American Spanish novelist and poet. Like his contemporaries Luigi Pirandello and Flann O'Brien, Alfau is considered a forerunner of later postmodern writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and Gilbert Sorrentino. His work anticipated many key elements of postmodern literature.

Locos : a comedy of gestures

206 pages
8 hours of reading

4.2(391)Add rating

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.