Translation Rights TQE / The Advantages Of Train Travel

After checking her husband into a psychiatric ward, a woman takes the train back into Madrid. A stranger onboard suddenly asks her, “Would you like to hear my life story?” He is Ángel Sanagustín, a psychiatrist who works in the same clinic and a specialist in personality disorders, which he studies through the writings of his patients. He carries those texts in a red folder which contains cases of schizophrenia, double lives, or paranoid patients convinced of government control over the masses. When the psychiatrist gets off in one of the stops to buy a drink, he misses the train, and the woman is left with the red folder. We will irresistibly want to read the texts along with her. In a Cervantine manner, the stories are humorous, creepy, labyrinthian, full of unending inventiveness, and they bring on a novel with a circular structure that is masterfully resolved. Furthermore, in the process of reading, the narration itself will question the pact of credibility with the reader, the limits of sanity and insanity, the supplanting of identity, and the distinction between reality and imagination.

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