The Sky Over Lima
A Novel
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
Based on a historic literary hoax, this “charming” novel is “a love letter to the creative process” from one of Spain’s most original authors (Kirkus Reviews).
José Gálvez and Carlos Rodríguez are poets. Or, at least, they’d like to be. Sons of Lima’s elite in the early twentieth century, they scribble poorly constructed verses and read the greats: Rilke, Rimbaud, and, above all others, Juan Ramón Jímenez, the Spanish Maestro. Desperate for Jímenez’s latest work, unavailable in Lima, they decide to ask him for a copy.
Certain Jímenez would never send his book to a couple of dilettantes, they concoct a plan à la Cyrano de Bergerac. They write to him posing as the lovely, imaginary Georgina Hübner. Incredibly, the poet takes the bait and responds with a book and letter. So begins the epistolary romance. As the maestro falls in love with Georgina, he writes his finest poetry. But when the mail delivery is stalled during the dockworkers’ strike, the scheme begins to unravel and reveal the vulgar truth.
“This sweepingly beautiful translation will enchant readers. Gómez Bárcena’s style is both fresh and classic, delightful and mysterious, and his characters—who feel like living, breathing creatures—are sure to captivate even as they break your heart.” —Library Journal, starred review
“Anyone who has ever wept over a poem or burned to write more and better and despaired because their talent let them down will read this novel and come away feeling understood.” —National Book Review
“Gómez Bárcena tackles the most serious topics while masterfully showing how to write a story that’s simultaneously a comedy, a tragedy, and a portrait of another culture. The style is magnificent, the narration told with originality, pulse, and rhythm. There’s little more to say: read Gómez Bárcena.” —El Cultural
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first novel, B rcena draws on a real-life literary hoax to craft an intriguing tale of transatlantic catfishing. Carlos, the introverted son of a vulgar rubber baron, and Jos , the swaggering scion of one of Peru's most illustrious families, are two rich friends who fancy themselves poets, "playing at being poor in a Lima garret." On a lark, and in hopes of securing a copy of his latest book, they strike up a correspondence with the Spanish poet and the real-life future Nobel Laureate Juan Ram n Jim nez, by posing as an earnest, besotted young woman, Georgina. Jim nez takes the bait, and so twice a month a ship carries letters between the imaginary muse and the pining poet, missives that miraculously escape the clutches of the boat's letter-gnawing rat. As Georgina becomes the protagonist of a serial epistolary novel within Barcena's novel, the young men struggle to flesh her out: whom to model her after, what to reveal and what to conceal, and what genre her story will ultimately belong to. The self-referential novel drives home, a little too insistently, the fictional nature of life and romance: "everything is literature... the entire world is a text constructed of words alone." However, B rcena grounds the literary games in a richly detailed, early 20th-century Lima and its cast of secondary characters: dock workers, prostitutes, caf -haunting literati. Its lightly ironic tone darkening as it proceeds, the novel sensitively explores how a literary prank shapes the sentimental, romantic, and moral education of Carlos, the more genuine of the two fraudsters.
