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by Carlos Rojas, Ребека Клейтман (Translator)

Acclaimed translator Edith Grossman brings to English-language readers Rojas’s imaginative vision of Francisco de Goya and the reverberations of his art in Fascist Spain

This historical novel by one of Spain’s most celebrated authors weaves a tale of disparate time periods: the early years of the nineteenth century, when Francisco de Goya was at the height of his artistic career, and the final years of Generalissimo Franco’s Fascist rule in the 1970s. Rojas re-creates the nineteenth-century corridors of power and portrays the relationship between Goya and King Fernando VII, a despot bent on establishing a cruel regime after Spain’s War of Independence. Goya obliges the king’s request for a portrait, but his depiction not only fails to flatter but reflects a terrible darkness and grotesqueness. More than a century later, transcending conventional time, Goya observes Franco’s body lying in state and experiences again a dark and monstrous despair.
 
Rojas's work is a dazzling tour de force, a unique combination of narrative invention and art historical expertise that only he could have brought to the page.

Genres: Spain, Fiction, Spanish Literature

321 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1978

About the author

Carlos Rojas is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Spanish Emeritus at Emory University.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A swirling series of narratives that merge fact and fiction in postmodernist style, shifting between Goya painting at the court of Charles IV in the C19th, and a biographer writing about Goya during Franco's last days. Rojas is excellent on 'reading' Goya's paintings in some detail and it's well worth reading with a tablet at hand so that you can Google the art works - I learned a lot by doing this.

The themes which emerge are of politics and art, of despotism and tyranny, and how to capture both a 'soul' and the impact of ideology on canvas.

There's a timeline at the back which is helpful to anyone less familiar with either Goya or Spanish history. This is a dense read at times but also surprisingly intimate, and told via an energetic prose style that is all about the voice.

Thanks to Yale University Press for an ARC via NetGalley.

[ManOfLaBook.com · Rating 4 out of 5]

For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

The Valley of the Fallen (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Carlos Rojas (translated by Edith Grossman) is a historical novel taking in different time periods in Spain. Mr. Rojas is an award-winning novelist and art historian.

Artist Francisco de Goya is at the most successful time of his career. He is the painter, and sounding board, of King Fernando VI who is dedicated to establish a cruel regime after Spain’s War of Independence.

The Valley of the Fallen (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Carlos Rojas (translated by Edith Grossman) is a very dense book, written in a postmodernist narrative which shifts between the court of King Charles IV of Spain (around the late 1700s) and the last days of Francisco Franco’s reign (mid 1970s).

The narrative merges fact and fiction, to tell two stories that even though are worlds apart, are still connected through a common language, ideology, politics, and art.

This is a dense read, I am not as familiar with Goya’s paintings Mr. Rojas is, so my reading was slowed down by looking them up on the Internet whenever they were mentioned. On the bright side, I could look up Goya’s paintings on the Internet at any time I wanted to.
We live in a wonderful age.

There is a helpful timeline at the end of the book, which I actually skimmed after I read a few chapters just to help me understand the narrative. My only complaint is about myself for not being able to read it in the original Spanish.

As usual, Ms. Grossman did a fantastic job with the translation, the prose is stylish, energetic and somewhat intimate.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was quite a challenging read, and although I enjoyed aspects of it, overall I remained unengaged and in fact found some of it quite tedious. It’s a time-shift novel, moving between early 18th century Spain and the 1970s, with Franco’s death imminent. If I didn’t know at least something of Spain’s’ history I think I would have found the book even harder to relate to – especially when it came to 18th century court politics and Napoleon’s exploits in the country. The earlier time frame explores Goya and his relationship with Charles IV, whilst the 1970s section concentrates on troubled Sandro Vasari, an art historian writing a biography of the great artist. This contemporary section I found the least successful, not least because Vasari is not a sympathetic character in any way. The parts of the book I really did enjoy were the purely art historical sections and the analysis of Goya’s art – with a tablet by my side I thoroughly enjoyed looking up the works mentioned and examining them in some detail. But I could have done that with any art history book, and I didn’t feel that incorporating such analysis into a novel added anything to the narrative. If anything it slowed down what is already a fairly slow novel. The mix of fiction, non-fiction and art history is relatively well integrated into the whole, but nevertheless overall I found the book unsatisfactory on many levels. An exploration of power and the duty of the artist to represent it truthfully makes for some thought-provoking reading at times, but the long passages about bull-fighting were, for me, unnecessary. An interesting novel, but not a very enjoyable one.

[Brooke Salaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dreamlike, and perhaps dream identical, evocation of the life and times of Goya, interwoven with the long, but with extended interruption, relationship of a man and woman in 1975 Spain during the radio broadcast of Franco's last days. The man, Sandro, is attempting to write a biography of Goya and it's his ruminations that seem to drive the story. Human baseness in its many forms is here taken to be Goya's main topic. We get some comparisons between the horrors of Goya's era during the war with the French and Franco's alliance with Hitler and despotism and subsequent enormous outpouring of public mourning in death. People are basically stupid seems to be a big message which I can't disagree with.
At times I grew a little impatient with what seemed to me an oversimplification of Goya's biography based on having recently read the wonderful Hughes monograph. Hughes convinced me that Goya did not either despise or lust after so many of his artistic subjects in the way it is often, and here again, assumed. We get a little metafiction surprise near the end which explains some of the odd behavior heretofore seen. Impressive with a few irritants imho.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable novel tying Goya to Franco. We have a writer working on a biography of Goya while in the background Franco is dying. We get Goya's life through his paintings which for R. is clearly a vision of Spain - especially the painting of Saturn eating his children. Spain, Franco, ate the children of Spain.

[Adam Lowy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much of the Goya sections were interesting, informative but as a whole , this didn’t pull me . Didn’t really care about anyone or anything about the novel’s construction to compel me. Meh.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Takes a little getting used to the writing style, and Wikipedia helped me out with the history of Spanish kings in the eighteenth century, but overall rather spectacular interweaving of history.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

La verdad es que me sorprendió lo bueno e innovador que encontré este libro. Lo que al principio me pareció iba ser una muy buena obra sobre el arte de Francisco Goya se volvió incluso más interesante al ver los capítulos entrelazar las historias de Fernando VII, Francisco Franco y el rol del arte en general. Rojas tiene un estilo fascinante que mantiene la atención del lector incluso a pesar del cambio de tono y atmosfera entre cada capítulo. El contraste entre la historia del arte de Goya, su vida, la (de)evolución política de España y la promesa de una España después de Franco es simplemente increíble. Una gran obra que consigue cautivar su audiencia completamente.

[Tomas S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kai kartais pervertini savo jėgas - išgirdus, kad tai Ryčio Zemkausko viena geriausių knygų - iš smalsumo puoli skaityti - ir supranti, kad dar nedaaugęs. Atskiromis vietomis kaip ir įdomu skaityti ispanų istoriją, bet visuma per sunki.

[J.D. DeHart · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Valley of the Fallen is a literary and entertaining read that appeals to those looking for quality fiction. I would gladly recommend the book as a text for readers of historical fiction.