Description
Book SynopsisThe interconnected stones that form Felipe Alfau's novel LOCOS take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young 'author' "For them", he complains, "reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply love it and make for it against ray almost heroic opposition" Alfau's "comedy of gestures" -- a mercurial dreamscape of the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy -- was written in English and first published in 1936, favorably reviewed for The Nation by Mary McCarthy, as she recounts here in her Afterword, then long neglected.
Trade Review"You keep reading this hypnotic novel the way a sleeping person wants to keep dreaming." — Publisher's Weekly
"Alfau's inventive 'comedy of gestures' is, like any hall of mirrors fun house, disorienting, maddening, and greatly entertaining. It has everything any modern best-seller needs: murder, incest, fallen priests, Iascivious nuns, a couple of suicides, several mysteries, the living dead, pimps and whores and poets, locales that shift from China to the Philippines to the Caribbean to Europe." — Washington Post
