Translation Rights TQE / Those Prince Valiants

 

 

The Besos River in the outskirts of Barcelona, Lieutenant Columbo, the comic book collection for young readers, The Sphinx of the Ice Fields by Jules Verne…, this book beautifully evokes, with humor, emotion and poetry, a given place and form of childhood: a city in the industrial surroundings of Barcelona in the 1970s and an immigrant family. And yet it is, at the same time, a story of initiation to literature through such elements as comic books, television series, or adaptations of the classics. The narrator teams up with his best friend, Ruiz de Hita, with whom he shares secrets and readings, describes his classes with a teacher who had been a legionnaire, the group of friends at school, Sundays with his uncle Ginés –a prototype of the picaresque–, his mother’s stories about her rural past, the disturbing presence of Miss Umbelina, a public woman, or one Christmas eve that marked the end of an era.

 

Always present in the horizon are the electric towers, the chimneys of the thermal plant, the bridge onto the highway and, above all, the river, omnipresent with its symbolic charge. Far from bearing witness to the harsh final years of the Franco regime, they are all part of the mythical backdrop of childhood readings. The narrator will end up discovering his social class, the political compromise of his elders and he will set out to keep alive, through writing and beyond the childhood years, the heroism of the courageous princes.

 

Los príncipes valientes is a wonderful first novel, equipped with an invisible internal structure of recurrences and associations that seem unstoppable. It is original and absorbing, with a moving ending that gives shape to the unexpected cosmogony of characters, objects, and stages that literature alone can rescue from oblivion.

 

‘La espléndida crónica de una iniciación a la lectura --y a la vida, que no es lo mismo aunque a veces se le parezca-- en el marco de una población del cinturón barcelonés. Una emocionante joya literaria.’

Rafael Tapounet, El Periódico

 

‘Una primera novela extraordinariamente madura, visceralmente vital.’

Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas, Culturas (La Vanguardia)

 

Javier Pérez Andújar (Sant Adrià de Besòs, Barcelona, 1965) studied Spanish Philology in the University of Barcelona and is the author of Catalanes todos (All Catalans), Las 15 visitas de Franco a Cataluña (Franco’s 15 Visits to Catalonia), and Salvador Dalí. A la conquista de lo Irracional (Salvador Dalí. The Conquest of the Irrational). He has published, as the editor and anthologist, a book of short horror stories Vosotros los que leéis aún estáis entre los vivos (You Who Read Are Still Among the Living), and has translated into Spanish the comic book Astérix El cielo se nos cae encima (Asterix, the Sky Is Falling Down Upon Us). He was editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Taifa for some time, founder of the fanzine Flandis Mandis, and a columnist in Mondo Brutto. As a journalist, he has collaborated with Ajoblanco, Rock de Lux and Primera Línea, among other publications, as well as with the radio stations Ona Catalana and Radio Nacional de España (Ràdio 4), and on the literary TV program Saló de Lectura. He is currently a collaborator of El País and of L’Hora del Lector, a literary program on Catalan television.