Translation Rights TQE / The Speed of Light

This is the story of a friendship, a friendship that begins in 1987 when the narrator, a young man who wants to become a novelist, travels to a university in the American Mid-west and meets Rodney Falk, with whom he will share an office.  He is a Vietnam War veteran, unsociable and unapproachable, fiercely bright and secretly corroded by his past.  This is also the story of a radical experience in the undecipherable abysm of wrong and guilt that the narrator will only come to understand and assume years later, when he achieves success and learns that it has a snaring side of corruption.  By then, the imprecise figure of Rodney and his devastating story will have imposed themselves with great force as an emblem of his own story, and perhaps of the human condition as well.

La velocidad de la luz is written with an apparent transparency and a plot that will not give the reader a rest.  It explores our unlimited capacity to do harm, the infinite stupidity of war and the infinite stupidity of success, but above all, it explores the definitive power that literature possesses to confront reality and to exorcize its demons.  It is a radical novel, necessary and unprecedented.  It is both a recapitulation and a new turn of the screw to one of the most personal and fascinating narrative universes in current Spanish literature.

Javier Cercas was born in Ibarhenando, Cáceres in 1962. He is the author of a book of short stories, Cuentos reales (True Tales) 2000, of a nouvelle, El móvil (The motive) 1987 and 2003, and of three novels, El inquilino (The Tenant) 1989 and 2000, El vientre de la ballena (The Belly of the Whale), and Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis). The latter is a novel that reached unprecedented success in bookshops, with readers, writers, and critics. It has received the following prizes: Premi Llibreter 2001 Narrativa, Premi Ciutat de Barcelona, Premio Librería Cálamo al mejor libro del año 2001, Premio Salambó, Premio de la Crítica de Chile, IV Gran Premio Qué Leer de los Lectores, Premio de Novela Histórica de Cartagena, Premio Extremadura a la Creación, Premio de los Lectores Crisol, Premio Grinzane Cavour. Javier Cercas worked for two years at the University of Illinois and, since 1989, is professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona. He collaborates regularly in the newspaper El País.