Translation Rights TQE / Time Wheel

Talens became known through the novel La parábola de Carmen la Reina (The Parable of Carmen the Queen) which was met with authentic enthusiasm by the critics.  Since then, he has gratified us with an extraordinary book of short stories Venganzas (Vengeances), and with a second novel, Hijas de Eva (Daughters of Eve).  According to this literary trajectory, it could be said that Talens finds himself at ease with equal ability in short narration, as well as in that of longer breadth.  And so, in Rueda del tiempo (Time Wheel), the antiheroes – typical in his works -, that give life to these tales, reach their greatness due to the accurate dominion of language and they move with such intensity that the reader ends up feeling them breathe at his side. 

“I’ve always believed that existing – or subsisting – consists of a linked flow of banal episodes that once in a while, as if to avoid boredom, are moved by a chance event capable of changing the direction of a destiny, what for a writer is equivalent to saying the direction of a story”, writes Manuel Talens, and there is no better definition for these vigorous tales.  From the gratuitous crime to chance’s unavoidable catastrophe, passing through the circular trip of a Canadian maquis, the lessons of a teacher formed in the French rebellion of May of 68, the pride of an old bullfighter, the hard work of a young man that turns fiction into reality, and the territorial redemption of a nihilist in exile, the characters “are united by the common thread of the desperate perception of life as a journey without reward, where all that matters is the dignity of this journey, since the goal is equivalent to silence.

Manuel Talens was born in Granada in 1948, and graduated from the city’s university with a degree in medicine. He later completed his studies in Paris and Montreal. Upon his return to Spain, he settled in Valencia, where he decided to dedicate himself to literature. Alongside his work as a novelist, he regularly collaborates in the opinion columns of the Valencian edition of the newspaper El País. He has also translated into Spanish works of fiction and semiotic texts, cinema and narrative.