Translation Rights TQE / Deep purple

Púrpura profundo (Deep Purple) won the XXII La Sonrisa Vertical Prize in March 2000.

Agustín Caban has just retired from a newspaper where he was a music critic. A lively seducer, he now has a lot of free time on his hands. He only has one overpowering urge: to invoke the spectres which up to now have provided his sole reason for living. Sebastián, his close friend and head of the entertainment section at the newspaper, gives him the push he needs and encourages him to write his memoirs. As Sebastián enthusiastically devours the pages given to him by the music critic, the reader is taken deeper into Agustin’s amorous world. There was the passionate affair with Virginia Tuten, the violinist whose exotic Caribbean fire was on the verge of burning to the ground the critic’s marriage; with the pianist Clint Verret, not the only man in Agustín’s life, but he was the one who led him to the edge of the abyss of intense love; with the diaphanous Clarissa Berdsley, a horn player who carried on a curious relationship with a bat…These, and other stories, lead Agustin along uncharted paths. Every musician with whom he has a relationship touches a new chord in him. For Agustin, music is always unconditionally linked to sexual passion. When Agustin conquers a new musician, he believes he has won more than their bodies —their deep purple— he savours the captivation of their intractable and unrepeatable inner melody: the Music —with a capital M— that all of us strive to achieve.

Mayra Montero was born in Havana in 1952 and has lived in Puerto Rico for over thirty years. She is the author of the erotic novels La última noche que pasé contigo (The Last Night I Spent with You, finalist for the XIII Sonrisa Vertical Prize in 1991) and Púrpura profundo (Deep Purple, XXII Sonrisa Vertical Prize in 2000), as well as of the novels Del rojo de su sombra (From the Red of His Shadow, 1993), Tú, la oscuridad (You, the Darkness, 1995), which established her internationally as a writer after being published in the United States, Como un mensajero tuyo (As Your Messenger, 1998), El capitán de los dormidos (The Captain of the Sleeping, 2002), and Son de almendra (Almond Song, 2006).