This is the first English translation of a picaresque classic -- a children's fantasy for adults-- written in 1951. The hero, a magical little boy, goes in search not of his fortune but of knowledge. He meets a master taxidermist, who teaches him the trade. Alfanhui attempts extraordinary experiments - making trees sprout feathers and creating birds that grow feathers like leaves. When his house is burned down, he travels around Castile, learning about colors, oxen, herbs, and other people: a lonely giant in a wood, a puppet who thinks he is a man, and his own grandmother with her collection of mysterious locked trunks. This is a celebration of the natural world through a boy's experiences.
The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhi (Dedalus Europe)
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Editorial Reviews
Review
...a book full of true lies -- Rafael Sanchez
About the Author
Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio is one of Spain's most celebrated novelists. Dedalus will publish The Jarama (1956), which won the Spanish National Critics' Prize, in 2003.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow,
By
This review is from: The Adventures of Ingenious Alfanhui (Paperback)
It's a shame that few people have discovered this book. It's truly a marvel. This book is about a boy's quest for knowledge, fiction, and color. Alfanhui (the main character) travels around Spain learning the various secrets of the earth here and there. For example, very early on in the book, he discovers a cave beneath a tree in front of the house he's living in, the roots of which drink water from a green pool underground. Thus, Alfanhui creates several containers of colored liquid and puts the roots of the tree inside them. Sure enough, the next day the tree has sprouted leaves of all the colors of the rainbow.
The book is episodic in nature (numerous chapters of between two and five pages), and can be read quickly, though I myself wish it had been longer. Indeed, the most shocking thing about reading this book was turning page 199 to discover that the book had ended. I literally couldn't believe it. I went back and reread the last chapter just to make sure the book wasn't kidding. It wasn't.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Female Embers to Warm the Dreams of Cats,
By Gordon Comstock (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Adventures of Ingenious Alfanhui (Paperback)
I'm completely in awe of the fact that The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui was not only Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio's first novel, but also was published when he was just 25 or 26 years old. Its fierce originality, explosive energy, and seemingly boundless imagination are all hallmarks of a young author, and yet the writing is so confident, so carefully calibrated in its effect, so free of the self-indulgence that would normally afflict such a naturally gifted young writer, that it seems like the work of a man twice Ferlosio's age. The story's abundant humor feels old and wise, and there is an underlying sadness throughout that gives weight to what might otherwise have been a flyaway exercise in youthful literary bravado. Simply put, Ferlosio is a genius of the first order.
It's unfortunate that Dedalus felt it necessary to mention Harry Potter in the first paragraph of Alfanhui's back cover, even if the best-selling status of Ferlosio's book in Spain bears comparison to Rowling's creation, because as the Kirkus UK review above demonstrates, this has inspired some misleading critical synopses. Alfanhui is not exactly a book about supranatural powers or events. In fact, one of its most distinguishing characteristics is what I would call ultranaturalism (I'm sick to death of the term magical realism, and there's an earthiness to Alfanhui that eludes more fantastical categorization anyway). Colors, metal, wood, birds, water, shoes, blood, plants--did I mention colors? All have a prominent place in Alfanhui's journey, and Ferlosio uses them to suggest a life within nature that is accessible not through magic, but through a sort of specialized knowledge, as if wonder were a trade like taxidermy or plumbing. This sense of another reality tightly bound to life as it's actually lived is nicely captured by one scene in which Alfanhui mourns a once-appealing female portrait that graces a fake window painted on the side of a house: "Waiting and waiting while the rain was slowly eroding her face and her blue woolen shawl. While time fell, sliding like a light shadow over her face, smoothing it away, merging it with the window, the wall, the wind. Ah, time, time, transforming her into a vague ghost, motionless on the wall, making her fade like a hopeless flower, while the women selling vegetables in the street down below berated their troop of children and knocked some common sense into them, and sold the garlic, leeks, onions and carrots which would later fill the street with the vulgar smell of lunch..." The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui is divided into three parts. In the first, he leaves home and learns to become a journeyman taxidermist. In the second, he travels to Madrid and forms a wary friendship with Don Zana, a living marionette. And in the third part, Alfanhui returns to nature, visiting his grandmother and tending oxen. Most chapters in the book are only three to five pages long. It's a quick read, and a memorable one.
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