Bøger af Julian Rios

A striking reassessment of the Don Juan myth. A literary tour de force, this extraordinary novel is told in single-minded pursuit of double meanings, but it is serious play. 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 puns and wordplay recalling Joyce's Finnegans Wake. A mock-scholarly commentary reveals the backgrounds of the masked revellers, while Rios' allusive language shows that words too wear masks, hiding an astonishing range of further meanings and implications. Larva revives a Hispanic tradition repressed for centuries by introducing the English tradition of puns, palindromes and acrostics (a word puzzle in which certain letters in each line form a word or words) and establishes Rios as the most accomplished successor (in any language) to Joyce.

Just as Ezra Pound wrote a "Homage to Sextus Propertius" to pay tribute to an important influence, Julian Rios offers in his new novel a "Homage to Ezra Pound" (as the original Spanish edition is subtitled). On November 1, 1972, news of Pound's death in Venice reaches three Spanish bohemians in London, passionate admirers of "il miglior fabbro" ("the better craftsman", as Eliot called him), who decide to honor Pound's memory by visiting various sites in London associated with him. Filled with allusions to Pound's life and works and written in a style similar to Finnegans Wake, Rios's word-mad novel features the same characters from his first novel, Larva: the poet Milalias, his girlfriend Babelle, and their mentor X. Reis, each of whom writes part of the novel: Milalias writes the Joycean main text, Reis (as Herr Narrator) adds commentary on facing pages, and Babelle furnishes maps and photos. Together, they compile the "Parting Shots" at the end, dazzling short stories that expand upon incidents in the main text. Sound confusing? No more so than the Cantos, and Rios is much funnier.

In the late '60s, Julian Rios began work on what would have been his very first novel, but fearing that it wouldn't pass the stringent Spanish censorship under Franco, decided not to submit the completed book to publishers. Soon distracted by what would be his magnum opus-the Larva series-the manuscript was set aside and forgotten, until the author found and dusted it off almost fifty years later. Quite unlike his later postmodernist work, the short and bitter Procession of Shadows is filled with stories of love, war, and vengeance, focusing on the tiny, remote village of Tamoga-a place where vendettas are passed down from generation to generation, and where violence has left its traces in every corner. A Winesburg, Ohio for the end times, Procession of Shadows shows us a very different side of the usually playful Rios: dark, direct, and pitiless.

A riotous tribute to James Joyce and a surprising tour of the house of fiction.