The ingenious gentleman and poet Federico Garca Lorca ascends to hell - Carlos Rojas

A modern Spanish masterpiece by one of the most extraordinary novelists of our time

In Carlos Rojas's imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico Garca Lorca, murdered by Francoist rebels in August 1936, finds himself in an inferno that somehow resembles Breughel's Tower of Babel. He sits alone in a small theater in this private hell, viewing scenes from his own life performed over and over and over. Unexpectedly, two doppelgngers appear, one a middle-aged Lorca, the other an irascible octogenarian self, and the poet faces a nightmarish confusion of alternative identities and destinies.

Carlos Rojas uses a fantastic premise-Garca Lorca in hell-to reexamine the poet's life and speculate on alternatives to his tragic end. Rojas creates with a surrealist's eye and a moral philosopher's mind. He conjures a profoundly original world, and in so doing earns a place among such international peers as Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and Jos Saramago.