A first entry in a five-part series set in pre-civil war Spain introduces Barcelona native Rafael Lopez Serrador, whose coming of age is marked by his interactions with people from all walks of life and forces that culminate in the destruction of the republic.
A first entry in an acclaimed five-part series set in pre-civil war Spain introduces Barcelona native Rafael Lopez Serrador, whose coming of age is marked by his interactions with people from all walks of life and forces that culminate in the destruction of the republic.
Rafael Lopez Serrador struggles towards manhood on the streets of pre-civil war Barcelona. In this setting, he joins a cast from all walks of life - Catalan nationalists, anarchists, Falangists, government ministers, labourers and prostitutes. The conflicts and ideals of these rogues and revolutionaries inform and echo the young man's own troubled coming of age. Rafael encounters forces that will destroy the Republic and which find their own dark counterpart in his violent, vengeful imagination.
This is the first, self-contained installment of Max Aub's six-novel epic, The Magic Labyrinth.
Evocative, modernist novel chronicles the prelude to the Spanish Civil War.
A contemporary of Lorca and Buñuel in Spain’s Second Republic, Max Aub escaped into a life of exile after General Franco seized Barcelona. His masterpiece, acknowledged in Spain as one of the best accounts of the Spanish Civil War, is the five-novel cycle known as The Magic Labyrinth—never before translated into English. A playwright as well as a novelist, he brings the period alive through vibrant dialogue and a story that navigates the factional intrigues that eventually erupted onto the streets in violence.
The protagonist of the first novel is Rafael López Serrador, whose coming of age in Barcelona introduces a cast from all walks of city life—Catalan nationalists, anarchists, Falangists, government ministers and showgirls. Just as central a character is Barcelona itself, lovingly depicted. Rafael’s adventures bring him into contact with the forces that were to destroy the Republic and determine the bloody course of the Spanish Civil War. Masterfully translated by Gerald Martin, author of Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, Max Aub’s novel is set to introduce to an English-speaking audience a classic of Spanish and Latin American literature—an account of the Spanish Civil War to compare with Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
