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Felipe Alfau

W

warm_enema

New Member
"IN WRITING THIS STORY, i AM FULFILLING A PROMISE TO MY POOR friend Fulano.
"My friend Fulano was the least important of men and this was the great tragedy of his life. Fulano had come to this world with the undaunted purpose of being famous and he had failed completely, developing into the most obscure person. He had tried all possible plans of acquiring importance, popularity, public acknowledgment, etc., and the world with a grim determination persistently refused to acknowledge even his existence.
"It seems that about Fulano's personality, if we are to grant him a personality, hung a cloud of inattention which withstood his almost heroic assaults to break through it.
"Fulano made the utmost efforts to be noticed, and people constantly missed him.
"I have seen Fulano shake hands during an introduction in a vehement way, stare violently and shake his face close to the other person's, literally yelling:
"Tanto gusto en conocerle."
And the next moment, the other individual was talking to somebody else, completely oblivious of Fulano.
"I have seen Fulano at another introduction remain seated and extend two fingers in he most supercilious manner. Nothing! All in vain. A second after the other person had absolutely forgotten his existence and was blankly looking through him."

From Locos (a comedy of gestures).

Any one heard of him? Any thoughts?
 
I read Locos a few years ago and I can't remember a damn thing about it. I think I read it simply because it was a book where the chapters could be read in any order - although, unlike B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates (which came with individual chapters loosely bound in a box), it was bound as a normal book so the chances of anyone actually taking Alfau up on that offer were slim.

Still, I do like the idea. Milorad Pavic also did it in Landscape Painted with Tea, where the chapters formed crossword clues and could be read "across" or "down."
 
wow, it was said out of print for half a century?! Hey! where did you get your copy? huh? :p



A link:
From Publishers Weekly
Out of print for half a century, this wildly surreal fable mirrors Spain in moral decay, in the years before a fascist takeover. Among the bizarre characters we meet are Garcia, a prematurely white-haired poet who becomes a fingerprint analyst; Dona Valverde, a pious, necrophiliac widow who enjoys touching corpses at funerals; and Sister Carmela, a nun who seemingly elopes with her own brother. Strangest of all is Senor Olozagaolive-skinned giant, ex-butterfly charmer in a circus, who was reared by Spanish monks in China and now runs an agency for selling dead people's clothes. The sundry misfits gather at the Cafe of the Crazy in Toledo, where hard-up writers, among them the author, hang out in search of exploitable characters; mistaken identities, outlandish situations, interchangeable roles abound. Is this Pirandello? Actually, it's closer to the somnambulistic tales of the French surrealists; you keep reading this hypnotic novel the way a sleeping person wants to keep on dreaming. In an afterword, McCarthy compares Locos to the modernist detective novels of Nabokov, Calvino and Eco. Maybe, but surely most of the sleuthing consists of figuring out the characters' interconnections in the Byzantine plot. Alfau neatly skewers Spain's fatalism, its obsessions with death and sin.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 
Shade, I hadn't heard of B.S. Johnson. The work you mentioned sounds like Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes. Sounds interesting. The only thing I've read similar to Locos is Pale Fire; which was fun in an odd way.

watercrystal, it is published by Dalkey Archive Press, in its current form.
 
Mine was a British edition published by Penguin in their 20th Century Classics range in 1991. It's out of print in the UK now though, but the Dalkey edition that warm_enema mentions is available...

B.S. Johnson is undergoing a minor revival in the UK as a highly acclaimed biography has just been published, which has resulted in the reissue of three of his novels. I've read one of the reissues so far, Albert Angelo, which is almost hypermanic in its attempts to cram limitless styles into 180 pages - and has the unique (I think) feature of a hole cut in some of the pages so that the reader can see forward to future events...

Try here for more info on Johnson.
 
I read both Chromos and Locos, though many years ago. I always liked the bit about the restaurant/cafe call "El Telescopio" because of the patrons long habit of examining their wine bottles to be sure that they had gotten every last drop.
 
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