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The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell
A modern Spanish masterpiece by one of the most extraordinary novelists of our time
In Carlos Rojas’s imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico García 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 doppelgängers 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—García 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 García Márquez, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and José Saramago.
In Carlos Rojas’s imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico García 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 doppelgängers 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—García 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 García Márquez, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and José Saramago.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published April 18, 2013
9 people are currently reading
260 people want to read
About the author
Carlos Rojas
129 books1 followerCarlos Rojas is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Spanish Emeritus at Emory University.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
dollars-for-unearthing
May 29, 2016Edith Grossman trans'd.
Apparently she's also working on Cervantes' 12 Exemplary Stories too.
@The Complete Review ::
http://www.complete-review.com/review...
Grossman is reportedly working on a trans of his Valle de los Caídos.
@The Modern Novel ::
http://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/...
He's BURIED.
Q:: Who’s a Spanish author people aren’t reading but should be?
Grossman:: Carlos Rojas, who I think is a stunning novelist. He has written a great deal in Spanish. Besides Valley of the Fallen I’ve translated one other book of his, The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell — the “ingenious gentleman” is what Cervantes called Don Quixote. I think Rojas should be much better known than he is. He’s highly imaginative, very original, and immensely smart, and he’s still alive: a living author, right in our own country.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/m...
Apparently she's also working on Cervantes' 12 Exemplary Stories too.
@The Complete Review ::
http://www.complete-review.com/review...
Grossman is reportedly working on a trans of his Valle de los Caídos.
@The Modern Novel ::
http://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/...
He's BURIED.
Q:: Who’s a Spanish author people aren’t reading but should be?
Grossman:: Carlos Rojas, who I think is a stunning novelist. He has written a great deal in Spanish. Besides Valley of the Fallen I’ve translated one other book of his, The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell — the “ingenious gentleman” is what Cervantes called Don Quixote. I think Rojas should be much better known than he is. He’s highly imaginative, very original, and immensely smart, and he’s still alive: a living author, right in our own country.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/m...
January 5, 2014
This book was a struggle for me to read and it probably deserves more than 3 stars. I don't think I understood a lot of what the writer was trying to do until the end of the story. Along the way I was alternatively frustrated and fascinated with the text. It's not like it is meant to be read word for word or even in a linear way. It is more like looking at a unique piece of art and gradually trying to understand and absorb what the artist is saying. Once I realized that, and it actually started happening for me, it blew me away.
Federico Garcia Lorca was a renowned Spanish poet who was executed in 1936 by rebels at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Characters (Salvadore Dali) and events in the story correspond to Lorca's history, which I knew nothing about. My curious interest in who he was stems from reading Leonard Cohen's biography, "I'm Your Man", where he repeatedly cites Lorca as a major influence on his writing. I ordered two books on Lorca from the library. The first one, a book of Lorca's poetry, had to go back to the library before I got a chance to read it. That left me with this book which blends a bio of Lorca with Alice falling down a rabbit hole while on acid.
This book, translated from original Spanish, was only 200 pages but it seemed to take forever to get through. I would spend long periods of time on one page, struggling to stay awake, only to then realize that 10 pages zipped by without being aware of it. Then I put it aside for two months and read other books. Finally finishing the book I am still not certain of what I have read, or even what I really think about it. But I believe the images I took from this story will be with me for a long time....
Federico Garcia Lorca was a renowned Spanish poet who was executed in 1936 by rebels at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Characters (Salvadore Dali) and events in the story correspond to Lorca's history, which I knew nothing about. My curious interest in who he was stems from reading Leonard Cohen's biography, "I'm Your Man", where he repeatedly cites Lorca as a major influence on his writing. I ordered two books on Lorca from the library. The first one, a book of Lorca's poetry, had to go back to the library before I got a chance to read it. That left me with this book which blends a bio of Lorca with Alice falling down a rabbit hole while on acid.
This book, translated from original Spanish, was only 200 pages but it seemed to take forever to get through. I would spend long periods of time on one page, struggling to stay awake, only to then realize that 10 pages zipped by without being aware of it. Then I put it aside for two months and read other books. Finally finishing the book I am still not certain of what I have read, or even what I really think about it. But I believe the images I took from this story will be with me for a long time....
June 11, 2022
Video review
https://youtu.be/ABN9GKVBNYM
https://youtu.be/ABN9GKVBNYM
July 10, 2013
dense novel in 3 parts (plus 1 part to set up how the theater/hell works for the poet and for the reader), as lorca sits in hell (an infinite spiral theater where the viewer sees her life played out on stage, over and over and over) watching his early days as a poet the comes THE ARREST. when lorca was executed, better disappeared in a non-secret way, people were shocked and horrified, why him? could i be next? the reader thinks just maybe this is NOT going to happen, that lorca will talk his way out and leave the area like everybody has been telling him to. but no, just a torture of author and in the story of the poet, asking.....what if?
part 2 = destiny. you can imagine no? lets just say garcia lorca was a genius who died too young, as did his republic.
part 3 = trial. the fascists find lorca guilty and shoot him in the back of the head.
yale u press has a whole series of fiction called "margellos world republic of letters"
part 2 = destiny. you can imagine no? lets just say garcia lorca was a genius who died too young, as did his republic.
part 3 = trial. the fascists find lorca guilty and shoot him in the back of the head.
yale u press has a whole series of fiction called "margellos world republic of letters"
August 12, 2014
It occurs to me to ask whether it is harder for a writer to live in a country that has nothing to write about, or in one that has only one thing to write about.
This was a struggle. The elaborate academic exercise overwhelms the tragedy of Lorca’s end. A lot of geometry: a spiral in hell, halves of selves, tripled selves who represent different possible courses of life. A lot of madness, real or feigned: Lorca wondering whether he is a real dead man or the figment of his older self’s dream, or whether that old man is mad; Valdes claiming madness in Granada; Valdez calling God mad.
Somehow it never caught fire for me.
This was a struggle. The elaborate academic exercise overwhelms the tragedy of Lorca’s end. A lot of geometry: a spiral in hell, halves of selves, tripled selves who represent different possible courses of life. A lot of madness, real or feigned: Lorca wondering whether he is a real dead man or the figment of his older self’s dream, or whether that old man is mad; Valdes claiming madness in Granada; Valdez calling God mad.
Somehow it never caught fire for me.
June 25, 2014
I was a sucker to buy it in the first place. Don't go near novels about real people that are written under the assumption that you know by heart the protagonist's biography, especially if all the characters are Spaniards with four-part names.
January 8, 2022
Very dreamlike. Full of interesting information about the time period. Olé! The author did a good job spicing up the style and making it all fit together very intuitively. The protagonist came across as a little plain, probably a disservice to Lorca.
June 6, 2023
Dead Spanish poets, ghosts, the Spanish Civil War, and Surrealist views of hell. Imagine hell as a never-ending spiral connected to private theaters where souls are condemned to watch their memories forever.
July 24, 2024
Después de la muerte, soñar con un infierno donde se puede representar lo ocurrido o lo que habría podido ocurrir de haber tomado otras decisiones en momentos clave.
García Lorca imagina teatro después de muerto.
García Lorca imagina teatro después de muerto.
July 8, 2019
It took me awhile to get into this book, but when I did, I found it brilliant!
November 17, 2024
An odd little book. An intro then three parts. Most likely did not fully understand but unsure if I care enough to understand to re-read.
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June 9, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2013/07/25/r...
Review by Alli Carlisle
In Carlos Rojas’s The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell, now in English translation by the venerable Edith Grossman, Lorca ruminates on his own death from the other side of it, stuck in a spiral of empty theaters that comprises Hell. Lorca meets the aged self he might have been (just as the eponymously referenced ingenious gentleman Quixote does) had he not been executed by Nationalist forces in 1939 for being outspokenly liberal — and possibly for being, though somewhat more abashedly, queer. Rojas’s Lorca contemplates his end on a dusty roadside; he argues with the phantoms of his killers; and he chases his thoughts in seemingly endless spirals much like the one he is stuck in.
The milieu into which Rojas’s novel was originally born was quite different from the one into which it arrives now, in English. When the novel came out, in 1980, Spain was in transition away from a dictatorship that had lasted four decades, since General Francisco Franco and his Nationalist forces won the Spanish Civil War. Franco had died in 1975; his designated successor, King Juan Carlos I, had begun a transition to democracy that included the new constitution of 1978 and laid the groundwork for the ascension of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party in 1982. In 1980, Rojas’s Lorca might have appeard in the public consciousness as a reminder of one of its dark moments, and a warning not to return to it. As Rojas’s novel reemerges, now in English, Spain finds itself in another transition, again into an unknown future, as it gazes around and tries to find its balance in the aftermath of economic collapse. Perhaps this Lorca appears yet again to serve as a floundering country’s guide into an unknown future.
And yet, despite the promise offered by any parallels of situation, something about Rojas’s novel seems deflated now. I followed the ideas, the philosophical questions, and some of the references, but I just couldn’t locate the book’s animus. Its basic premise — this I found quite easily, as it’s very repetitive — is that Hell is unending consciousness, “absolute memory”, much to Lorca’s horror. This is only remarkable if you know Lorca (it turned out my impressionistic memory of his work, left over from a casual, teenaged saunter through the collection I bought on vacation in Granada a decade ago, required supplement; I recommend similar preparation if you plan to pick up this book but don’t know Lorca well). Broadly speaking, Lorca’s work is obsessed with death. His poems churn with premonitions and fears of his own death, and almost a certainty of its premature coming. It resonates when Rojas’s Lorca tells us, “you fear death because you think it means the loss of consciousness,” but in fact, it is much worse: “I never could have imagined, as perhaps no one in the world ever has, that death was in fact a sentence to be precisely who we were, fully conscious of ourselves, through all of time and perhaps beyond days and centuries.”
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2013/07/25/r...
Review by Alli Carlisle
In Carlos Rojas’s The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell, now in English translation by the venerable Edith Grossman, Lorca ruminates on his own death from the other side of it, stuck in a spiral of empty theaters that comprises Hell. Lorca meets the aged self he might have been (just as the eponymously referenced ingenious gentleman Quixote does) had he not been executed by Nationalist forces in 1939 for being outspokenly liberal — and possibly for being, though somewhat more abashedly, queer. Rojas’s Lorca contemplates his end on a dusty roadside; he argues with the phantoms of his killers; and he chases his thoughts in seemingly endless spirals much like the one he is stuck in.
The milieu into which Rojas’s novel was originally born was quite different from the one into which it arrives now, in English. When the novel came out, in 1980, Spain was in transition away from a dictatorship that had lasted four decades, since General Francisco Franco and his Nationalist forces won the Spanish Civil War. Franco had died in 1975; his designated successor, King Juan Carlos I, had begun a transition to democracy that included the new constitution of 1978 and laid the groundwork for the ascension of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party in 1982. In 1980, Rojas’s Lorca might have appeard in the public consciousness as a reminder of one of its dark moments, and a warning not to return to it. As Rojas’s novel reemerges, now in English, Spain finds itself in another transition, again into an unknown future, as it gazes around and tries to find its balance in the aftermath of economic collapse. Perhaps this Lorca appears yet again to serve as a floundering country’s guide into an unknown future.
And yet, despite the promise offered by any parallels of situation, something about Rojas’s novel seems deflated now. I followed the ideas, the philosophical questions, and some of the references, but I just couldn’t locate the book’s animus. Its basic premise — this I found quite easily, as it’s very repetitive — is that Hell is unending consciousness, “absolute memory”, much to Lorca’s horror. This is only remarkable if you know Lorca (it turned out my impressionistic memory of his work, left over from a casual, teenaged saunter through the collection I bought on vacation in Granada a decade ago, required supplement; I recommend similar preparation if you plan to pick up this book but don’t know Lorca well). Broadly speaking, Lorca’s work is obsessed with death. His poems churn with premonitions and fears of his own death, and almost a certainty of its premature coming. It resonates when Rojas’s Lorca tells us, “you fear death because you think it means the loss of consciousness,” but in fact, it is much worse: “I never could have imagined, as perhaps no one in the world ever has, that death was in fact a sentence to be precisely who we were, fully conscious of ourselves, through all of time and perhaps beyond days and centuries.”
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2013/07/25/r...
February 25, 2015
Poets.org tells us that Federico Garcia Lorca is one of the most important Spanish poets and dramatists of the twentieth century. Born in 1898 a few miles from Granada he travelled to Madrid in 1919 where he remained for the next fifteen years, writing the scandalous play “El Maleficio de la mariposa” and the collection of poems “libro de poemas” in 1921 based on Spanish folklore, infused with popular themes such as Flamenco and Gypsy culture. Joining the group of artists known as “Generacion del 27” along with Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, he was of course exposed to surrealism. He moved to New York City in 1929 but returned to Spain after the proclamation of the Spanish Republic. Returning to his country home in 1936 at the outbreak of civil war he was arrested by Franquist soldiers and after a few days in jail he was taken to “visit” his brother-in-law, whom the soldiers had murdered, at the cemetery he was executed.
Carlos Rojas’ novel “The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell” starts with “the Spiral” where we join the poet in hell. He is in a theatre where all his living memories are played out, but he cannot sleep, nor can he participate:
The magic of free will in hell incarnates those memories on stage. Still, the flashes from the past are always painted, not live. If I go up on the boards, so often confused by their apparent veracity, they vanish immediately at my approach. As a fata morgana flees before you tread on it, or vampires turn to ash at dawn. The proscenium and set are empty beneath the arch and raised curtains. The light from the transoms, which recalls amber or alabaster, illuminates only my shadow on stage. The useless shadow of a dead man, alone in eternity with the mirage of his memories.
Each theatre represents a dead person reliving their living past, Lorca can move between theatres in the eternal spiral, some show events to him, others are simply empty. Hell is within us, our own memories. The eternal existentialist angst, the struggle to make sense where there is none:
For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/
Carlos Rojas’ novel “The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell” starts with “the Spiral” where we join the poet in hell. He is in a theatre where all his living memories are played out, but he cannot sleep, nor can he participate:
The magic of free will in hell incarnates those memories on stage. Still, the flashes from the past are always painted, not live. If I go up on the boards, so often confused by their apparent veracity, they vanish immediately at my approach. As a fata morgana flees before you tread on it, or vampires turn to ash at dawn. The proscenium and set are empty beneath the arch and raised curtains. The light from the transoms, which recalls amber or alabaster, illuminates only my shadow on stage. The useless shadow of a dead man, alone in eternity with the mirage of his memories.
Each theatre represents a dead person reliving their living past, Lorca can move between theatres in the eternal spiral, some show events to him, others are simply empty. Hell is within us, our own memories. The eternal existentialist angst, the struggle to make sense where there is none:
For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/
November 14, 2013
I loved this book! Edith Grossman's translation is poetic and powerful. The novel is also terrifying, especially at the end as Lorca relives his final hours before his execution. I even sent for the collected poems of Lorca, so that I would know more than just two of his poems. The reader needs to know something of the films of Luis Bunuel, the affair with Salvador Dali, and the art of Brueghel, among many other things--a lot of which I was sadly ignorant. Nevertheless, I loved this book and hope that more of Rojas' work will be translated.
October 9, 2013
it reads like a dream; watching the fog clear felt like an incredible journey
December 1, 2013
Challenging book to say the least. Dream-like throughout, at times it reminded me of the film version of Marat/Sade. In fact, someone should make this into a movie...brilliant!
May 8, 2015
Gorgeous writing, moving text.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews