Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell

Rojas Carlos, Grossman Edith

In Carlos Rojas' imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered by Francoist rebels in August 1936, finds himself in an inferno that somehow resembles Breughel's Tower of Babel. He sits alone in a small theatre in this private hell, viewing scenes from his own life performed over and over and over. Unexpectedly, two doppelgangers appear, one a middle-aged Lorca, the other an irascible octogenarian self, and the poet faces a nightmarish confusion of alternative identities and destinies. Carlos Rojas uses a fantastic premise – Garcia Lorca in hell – to reexamine the poet's life and speculate on alternatives to his tragic end. Rojas creates with a surrealist's eye and a moral philosopher's mind. He conjures a profoundly original world, and in so doing earns a place among such international peers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and Jose Saramago.

About the Author

Carlos Rojas is a novelist, an art historian, and since the age of fifty a creator of visual works of art. He was born in Barcelona and came to the United States as a young man. In 1960 he joined the faculty of Emory University, where he is now Charles Howard Candler Professor of Spanish Emeritus. He has received numerous important Spanish literary prizes, including the Premio Nadal.

Edith Grossman has translated into English many works by major Latin American and Peninsular writers, garnering an array of awards and honours.

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