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.
Brief description:
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.
Review Quotes:
"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