Translation Rights TQE / The Thirst for Salt

La sed de sal, an intriguing and reflexive crime novel, offers with prodigious prose a dazzling interpretation of the fragility of what we know or interpret, of fatality and the feeling of guilt.

A man who answers to the name of Travel travels to the city of Murania following the footsteps of a Hispanist who went all over the region in the 1930s. Local feasts are being celebrated and, due to the intrigues of the driver who picks him up on the road, Travel ends up arrested in connection to the disappearance of a young woman. From his prison cell, he can feel that the crowd outside wishes to lynch him. Regardless of his conversations with the guards and of his frustrated attempt at escaping, Travel cannot step out of this nightmare, at times seemingly diabolical and then a strange and peculiar stratagem. With the cinematographic references of Touch of Evil by Orson Welles, or Breathless by Godard, the narrator cannot help thinking about destiny, guilt and betrayal, while he tries to obsessively reconstruct the net and the interests of the possible culprits.

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.”