Translation Rights TQE / The Curve of the Instep

Vicente Muñoz Puelles visited our catalogue for the fifth time, the third time in our erotic series: after Amor Burgués (Bourgeois Love) came Anacaona (Anacaona), novel which won him the 3rd edition of La Sonrisa Vertical Prize.

Muñoz Puelles confesses that for a long time he doubted whether to become a painter or a writer, adding that «to this day I refuse to believe that I have chosen one vocation over the other». It therefore should not surprise us that after writing two books about Goya (Yo, Goya —I, Goya— and El último suspiro de Francisco de Goya —The Final Whim of Francisco de Goya—) and having been awarded for his erotic fiction, he should feel attracted to the figure of Pierre Molinier (1900-1976), a painter who was admired by the surrealists, especially André Breton, and creator of an erotic universe which is now acclaimed around the world.

It all began in 1995, while Muñoz Puelles compiled information for his Infiernos eróticos: La colección Berlanga (Erotic Underworlds: The Berlanga Collection (an illustrated book about the erotic library of the renowned filmmaker Luis G. Berlanga, who is also director of La Sonrisa Vertical) and he came across the correspondence the filmmaker had maintained with Molinier. The letters, the photographs which were attatched to them and the stories which Berlanga himself told the author, convinced him that there lay the seeds of an erotic novel which he had to write.

It goes without saying, considering the storytelling abilities of Muñoz Puelles, that although he takes the life of Molinier as a pretext, he withdraws from it constantly and that most of the erotic experiences which are attributed to him are fictional. What we do detect in La curvatura del empeine (The Curvature of an Instep) are a few characteristic traits of his obsessions: his intense and somewhat cruel eroticism, his fetishism, narcissism and transvestism. Molinier looked for woman everywhere: in his clothes and accessories, in the life-size dolls he created, in himself. He lived in a world where all aspects of reality were confused, surrounded by his lovers, the creatures in his paintings, his photomontages, his female garments, his masks and his vibrators. He had transformed his painting into an erotic act to such an extent that he blended the oil paints with his own semen. Such is the phantasmagorical world which Muñoz Puelles recreates.

Vicente Muñoz Puelles was born in Valencia in 1948. Apart from his three erotic books, Tusquets Editores published two more of his novels: Sombras Paralelas (Paralell Shadows), recreated on film by Gerardo Gormezano, and El Ultimo Manuscrito de Hernando Colón (The Last Manusript of Hernando Colón). He is also the author of another six novels, some of which are: La Emperatriz Eugenia en Zululandia (The Empress Eugenia in Zululand), which won the Azorín Prize in 1993 and the Literary Criticism Prize of Valencia in 1995, and Yo, Colón (I, Columbus), whose French version won the «Ascension pour la Lecture» Prize in 1994, awarded by the youth of BrianÇon. He has also published two collections of short stories. He has been awarded with the City of Valencia Prize on two occasions. He has edited two books about Columbus and Cabeza de Vaca, and has translated the works of Fenimore Cooper and Joseph Conrad.