Translation Rights TQE / The Coarse Spirit

The day has been set to pay homage to Mr. Gumersindo on his retirement. Speeches have been prepared, the town of Murania receives the teacher’s ex-students, and the local authorities decide to edit a volume compiling his texts. Soon after Mr. Gumersindo’s death, the narrator, his highs chool mate, discovers that the caustic, eccentric and learned defender of Classical culture, this Latin teacher who always treated his pupils with respect, has left many pages of autobiographical texts. El espíritu áspero seeks to remember that singular man and his circumstances. The narrator, true to the memories written Gumersindo, tells us about his rural childhood, his education in a religious boarding school, and his years as an inexperienced and later venerated teacher. He also wants to include the legendary anecdotes told by his students, and include his brilliant literary incursions, full of verbal games and playful use of language, with rhymes and palindromes, nicknames and puns which he practiced all through his life.

Stories become intertwined as the past is mixed with the present, comical anecdotes with literary thought, and stylistic exercises with likeable characters. El espíritu áspero creates an autonomous world ruled by a brilliant style of writing.

After the publication by Tusquets Editores of two novels that have become works of cult fiction, Gonzalo Hidalgo Bayal now gives us his most ambitious novel, a true literary feast about an anonymous and generous genius, an unforgettable character that marked the lives of all who came to know him. 

About Campo de amapolas blancas

“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)

 “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.”