Translation Rights TQE / The Red Quartz of Salamanca

Luciano G. Egido’s case confirms somthing we cannot often state:  there is no age limit for writing a great first novel.

We were sure that El cuarzo rojo de Salamanca (The Red Quartz of Salamanca) would catch avid observers of the Spanish literary scene by surprise, just as it surprised us.  what we have here is a novel written in the purest romantic tradition of Stendhal.  Not only due to its historical bakdrop, but also due to the abstracted and passionate nature of its unbalaced and picturesque characters, like floats in some infernal dance painted by Goya.  The story involves the reader in a  fascinating and epic plot filled with military feats, sentiments, passions, reflections, battles, rivalries, intrigues, and betrayals. 

Among the ruins left behind by the French and English armies during the devastating years of the foreign invasions dating from the beginning of the nineteenth century, amidst hate and fear, a youth who has “come to like the taste of nothingness” - and the spiralling madness which breaks down hope - joins a group of lancers fighting for independence.  But it is also a struggle against his father, a francophile who has tried to inculcate his foreign tastes in his son.  It is above all, a struggle against his own damned but irresistable incestuous love for Manuela, his unfaithful and disloyal sister who would betray anyone for the passionate embrace of the enemy:  “I had no choice (...) but to go on loving Manuela from a distance and to die anonymously in a gloriless adventure.”  Thus the young man embarks on a twin struggle, both internal and external, for an independence that seems impossible in times of turbulence and confusion, to overcome desperation so that “life will be more than hating”.

Luciano G. Egido was born in Salamanca in 1928. After a lifetime’s dedication to the University, literary journalism and the cinema, he published his first novel El cuarzo rojo de Salamanca (The Red Quartz of Salamanca) at the age of 63. With this first novel he won the Miguel Delibes Prize in 1993. With his second, El corazón inmóvil (The Immobile Heart), he obtained the Critics’ Award in 1995. The reader will agree that Egido’s beginnings as a novelist are enviable, and that it would be ridiculous to deny that he is one of the contemporary writers clearly destined for immanent and definitive preeminence.