Julian Rios

A man abandoned by his lover writes a letter about each of the 26 women he loved before this woman.

Loves that Bind

In the late '60s, Julián Ríos began work on what would have been his very first novel, but fearing that it wouldn't pass the stringent Spanish censorship under Franco, decided not to submit the completed book to publishers. Soon distracted by what would be his magnum opus—the Larva series—the manuscript was set aside and forgotten, until the author found and dusted it off almost fifty years later. Quite unlike his later postmodernist work, the short and bitter Procession of Shadows is filled with stories of love, war, and vengeance, focusing on the tiny, remote village of Tamoga—a place where vendettas are passed down from generation to generation, and where violence has left its traces in every corner. A Winesburg, Ohio for the end times, Procession of Shadows shows us a very different side of the usually playful Ríos: dark, direct, and pitiless.

The Novel of Tamoga

Procession of Shadows

Julián Ríos

First published in Spain in 1983 and proclaimed "an instant postmodern classic, without a doubt the most disturbingly original Spanish prose of the century" (Encyclopedia Britannica 1985 Book of the Year), Larva is a rollicking account of a masquerade party in an abandoned mansion in London. Milalias (disguised as Don Juan) searches for Babelle (as Sleeping Beauty) though a linguistic fun house of polylingual puns and wordplay recalling Joyce's Finnegans Wake. A mock-scholarly commentary reveals the backgrounds of the masked revelers, while Ríos's punning and allusive language shows that words, too, wear masks, hiding an astonishing range of further meanings and implications. Larva's tale, a reassessment of the Don Juan myth in our time, is told in single-minded pursuit of double meanings, but it is serious play. It revives a Hispanic tradition repressed for centuries by introducing the Madhatter English tradition of puns, palindromes, and acrostics, by creating Joycean echoes and pushing language to its maximum connotative capacity. Larva has been praised by such leading Spanish-language writers as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, and Severo Sarduy, and establishes Ríos as the most accomplished successor to Joyce.

Julian Rios

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