Translation Rights TQE / Field of White Poppies

This story begins with the adventures of two kids in a Catholic school in the city of Murania and ends with the chanceful meeting on the street, many years later and also in Murania, with a gloomy and desolate man that inspires in the narrator the memories of those days long gone. Between the two events, the youth of the two friends, their trips and first loves, their studies in Madrid and Salamanca, Paris and the Latin neighborhood, books, movies, music all take place. Perhaps it is more exact to say that what takes place is the links of time written by memory. Or rather that exact and familiar air of remembered and forgotten memories that allows us all to eventually recognize, perhaps quietly – if they ever existed at all – those fields of white poppies and the desperate dream of their immaculateness.

“A magnificent and moving novel.”

Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio

“The heart has its secrets (its mysterious way of knowing), and that quivering knowledge is explored in this unforgettable and masterful story”.

From the Epilogue by Luis Landero

About Paradoja del Interventor

“One of the most brilliant written works in current Spanish narrative. A very solid work, directly recommendable, top-notch. A grand novel that should not be ignored by those who seek good literature.”

José María Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC de las Artes

“Watch out reader. This is the most important Spanish novel that I have read in years.”

Rafael Conte, Babelia (El País)

“Pages plotted with admirable literary trade, with stylistic delicacy that should not go unnoticed by readers, and especially by critics.”

Nicolás Miñambres, Diario de León

“A definite masterpiece.”

Juan José Armas Marcelo, ABC de las Artes

Gonzalo Hidalgo Bayal was born in Higuera de Albalat (Cáceres) in 1950. He has degrees both in Philology of Romance Languages and in Visual Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid. He currently works as a high school literature teacher in the city of Plasencia. He is the author of two literary essays, Camino de Jotán (On the Way to Jotán, 1994) and Equidistancias (Equidistances, 1997). Hidalgo Bayal has become a singular narrator through his novels: Miseria fue, señora, la osadía (Misery Was, Ma’am, the Audacity, 1988), El cerco oblicuo (The Oblique Fence, 1993), Amad a la dama (Love the Lady, 2002), and Paradoja del interventor (Paradox of the Supervisor), his culminating work which Tusquets recovered for its catalog, as it now does with Campo de amapolas blancas, a “desolate and masterful” narration, to quote Luis Landero, and, in the words of Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, “magnificent and moving.”