Description:
Mariano Fortuny, scion of an artistic dynasty, inventor, photographer, and costumier of genius, was a touchstone of the Belle Èpoque: he built stages for Wagner, designed dresses for Sarah Bernhardt, and was a crucial inspiration for Proust's philosophy of memory. The list of his illustrious acquaintances range from D'Annunzio to Chaplin, from Caruso to Isadora Duncan, and in this, the first novel by Spain's Pere Gimferrer to be translated into English, they gather like actors on a stage, in Venetian palaces, in Parisian apartments, and in the village squares of the small towns of Catalonia, forming a historical tableau of the vigor and dissipation of Europe's artistic demimonde from the end of the Third Republic to the outbreak of the Second World War.
Brief description:
Pere Gimferrer is Spain's most acclaimed living writer, the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction published in Spanish and Catalan.
Review Quotes:
Praise for Fortuny
"A series of interwoven prose poems packed with lush imagery evoking the aesthetics of the Belle Epoque and successive decades . . . Gimferrer arrays his succinct, elegant word-pictures like pleats in a Fortuny gown, resulting in a slim tour de force. Octavio Paz's introduction, another marvel of poetic prose, offers readers a welcome guide through Gimferrer's gallery of bygone beauty."--Publishers Weekly
"Through immersing the reader in dense, sensuous scenes with the precision and flourish associated with his name, Spanish poet Pere Gimferrer relays an impression of the real-life Belle Époque man, Mariano Fortuny. The world that swirls around Fortuny in this novella captures the fragile time and humanity of World War I Europe with dizzying precision."--World Literature Today