Translation Rights TQE / Fabulous Narrations for Stories

One of the main characters describes this as the story of three friends that grow apart with the passing of time. In the big city, Santos, who comes from a rural background, discovers his weakness for mature women and pornography; Martiniano, Azorín’s nephew, vows eternal hatred against the intellectuals after the way his uncle has treated him; and Patricio, a writer, dreams of the day when he will publish his first novel. The three live in the Student Residence Hall in Madrid during the bustling 1920’s. While busy undergoing initiations, confronting other student groups, participating in explosive gatherings, sabotaging conferences, and insisting on getting Patricio’s novel published, they hardly realize that they are putting at risk their secret plan to create a literary generation of their own: that of 1927. This work of fiction is permeated in such a calculated way by characters such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, Ortega y Gasset, José Moreno Villa, and José Antonio Primo de Rivera that no one would dare say it’s anything but true. When the Republic comes around, the destinies of the three friends will go down different paths and a reunion will become unthinkable.

Worked out as masterful collage of quotes and materials, the novel advances as a bomb whose fuse is cleverly ignited at the end. The clever use of humor makes it a true feast, and it proves once again that there is no better way to tell a story about a given time period than through the use of fabulous narrations instead of stories. Provocative, explosive, but dominated by a masterful hand, Fabulosas narraciones por historias became one of the undisputable milestones in recent Spanish literature to the small group who read it when it was first published, an opinion that has become widespread. It was therefore necessary to give it a new opportunity.

’Un peligroso terrorista de la pluma... Una extraordinaria novela, tan extraordinaria como desvergonzada, iconoclasta, irreverente; brillante y deslenguada hasta decir basta.’ 

Javier Goñi, El País

Antonio Orejudo was born in Madrid in 1963. He has a doctorate in Spanish Philology and, for seven years, worked as a Spanish literature professor in different universities throughout the United States. He is currently a professor in the University of Almería and has spent a year as a visiting professor in the University of Amsterdam. Fabulosas narraciones por historias won the XX Tigre Juan Prize for the best first novel in 1997, one year after its publication. In 2000 he won the XV Andalucía Prize for Novel with Ventajas de viajar en tren (Advantages of Travelling by Train). Reconstrucción (Reconstruction, 2005), his most recent novel, has been translated into German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Korean and Dutch, and the German translation in particular was described as “the year’s most impressive Spanish book”, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung