Customer Reviews

Locos: A Comedy of Gestures (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I can't understand why this is not regarded as one of the greatest works of modern fiction. It anticipates many of the great writers of the latter half of the century, while being every bit as good as those who came later. The first two chapters are a bit hard and left this reader thinking Very clever, but.....

However the next three stories are excellent and I was quickly drawn into the surreal world of Alfau. Each chapter works well as a short story, but the further the reader digs, the more the stories link into a single novel rich in characters and ideas. Borges, Calvino, Kundera and the Boom-time Latin Americans were great writers, but after reading Alfau I realise they were not as original as I'd long thought. A book waiting to be rediscovered (again!).

This may sound absurd - but "Locos-...." is truly the work of a genius. Some books surpass the boundaries of time and this is one such book. To summarize the book in one sentence will be like this "non-characters are characters, fiction is reality and solutions are problems".
Felipe Alfau was a strange character and so are his books - very very different, they remind us of the writings of Vargas Llosa with a taste of Cortazar. This is not a translation rather Alfau has written the book in English so all the spices of the Spanish culture are visible. This is extremely rare even with the best of the translators. You get a taste of Spain and a vivid picture of the vibrant society which was so different from the rest of Europe. The people are full of life and passion. Love and passion are the means for making life flow and may be we all need to follow that some day.
You can look at this book either as a short story book or a novel - since it has nine short stories which can either be individually read but they are also connected to each other.
I am long time fan of Marquez and I can promise that this book is equally impressive as any book from Marquez. It is a must buy.

I share the puzzlement of the reviewer below over why this isn't considered one of the 20th Century's great works of fiction. I'd go further and say this is probably the most underrated novel of the last 100 years. The most important literature not only blazes a trail, but does so in a way that compares favorably to the books it inspires. This is true for Locos. The book should have had a stronger edit, but what Alfau achieves here - stories that rewrite each other, characters who morph into each other - unleashed new powers from the fictional narrative that have yet to be fully tapped. There's a moment at the end of a story called "A Character" that is one of the very few mindblowing experiences I've had reading fiction. Alfau was probably the first novelist since Laurence Sterne to understand this potential in narration. There's a character in Locos named Fulano who, desperate to get others to notice him, breaks a storefront window. The owner comes out, ignores Fulano and wonders how such a thing could have happened. In a sad way, Locos is like Fulano. Everyone marvels at the glass it shattered, but nobody can see Locos.

One of the best things about Felipe Alfau's books is that they are clever metafictions which often anticipate the experiments of writers such as John Barth, Italo Calvino, Milorad Pavic, etc, but they are much lighter in tone. So you get the full metafictional experience without the creased brow! Apart from that, Alfau is one of the best creators of eccentric characters around. The black mandarin, Chinelato, and the slightly sinister doctor, Jose de los Rios, are brilliantly original protagonists. Also, Alfau is a romantic and the book can be just as tender in some parts as it is adventurous or nightmarish in others (and the section dealing with Dona Valverde is something of a horror story). This is the only book by Alfau I've read, and I searched unsuccessfully for many years for anything else he might have written. Now I've finally discovered amazon and it appears he did write a second novel, so I'm going to order it when I've finished writing this, to see if it matches up to Locos.

Felipe Alfau's phenomenal LOCOS: A COMEDY OF GESTURES anticipates a number of other movements and writers - Nabokov, Borges, Calvino and Cortazar could all be said to owe this novel a huge debt, whether they realize it or not.

In 9 interlocking stories which all coalesce around a cafe (and cafe culture) in pre-Franco Madrid, Alfau (who only wrote one other novel, before taking up a working-class life in New York) creates a series of characters who step in and out of each others' dreams and stories, interacting with the author, who in turn is pulled into the novel as a character.

I'm afraid that my synopsis doesn't really do this mind-bending piece of fiction approriate credit. I would however recommend this to anyone with a love of literature, or anyone impressed by the vast accomplishment the human imagination can occasionally be capable of. A magnificent book.

-David Alston

This is a beautiful, witty series of interconnected stories that pre-sages John Barth and other ironic contemporaries. The characters auditioning for the novelists who will immoralize them at the Locos Cafe enchant, misbehave, and appear to fail Alfau. In an age where most prominent writers honestly believed authorship could change the world, Alfau is a refreshing antidote, suggesting that the act of writing merely troubles the writer.

Felipe Alfau explores the creative process in "Locos," especially the relationship of the creator ( that is, the author or artist) with the worlds or visions he has created. A writer in the surrealistic tradition of Spain in the 1920's, a kind of literary Dali, we witness Alfau literally falling into his own novel, and we thereby witness his discovery of self through confrontation with often hilarious, always colorful characters of his own devising. Once inside his own novel, Alfau seemingly loses his special separation of creator from created, and his characters take on lives of their own, sometimes transmuting into one another, or splitting into multiple characters... sometimes several meld into one, seemingly. In this creative space, nothing is real and everything is possible.
"Locos" is a significant work in that it is the creation of a Spanish surrealist disconnected from his cultural environment ( Alfau lived in New York) who met very limited success as a novelist; indeed, "Locos" was found only recently and republished. It is an interesting, if sometimes mind-bending, and always very funny read in a vaguely dark, Nabokovian way

What a surprise! Felipe Alfau, an spanish exile author, writing in english in the spanish civil war period (more or less) and with no political objectives in mind. If you are spanish you have to read him now! Enjoy an incredible style (sounds like spanish tranlated to english) with no paralels, and also discover little stories that relates to one another and builds a unic masterpiece about what literature is. Meta literature, laberinths, narrator within narrators, mirror games and sperpentic world. You really have to give it a try

I share the puzzlement of the reviewer below over why this isn't considered one of the 20th Century's great works of fiction. I'd go further and say this is probably the most underrated novel of the last 100 years. The most important literature not only blazes a trail, but does so in a way that compares favorably to the books it inspires. This is true for Locos. The book should have had a stronger edit, but what Alfau achieves here - stories that rewrite each other, characters who morph into each other - unleashed new powers from the fictional narrative that have yet to be fully tapped. There's a moment at the end of a story called "A Character" that is one of the very few mindblowing experiences I've had reading fiction. Alfau was probably the first novelist since Laurence Sterne to understand this potential in narration. There's a character in Locos named Fulano who, desperate to get others to notice him, breaks a storefront window. The owner comes out, ignores Fulano and wonders how such a thing could have happened. In a sad way, Locos is like Fulano. Everyone marvels at the glass it shattered, but nobody can see Locos.