Bomarzo - Paperback

by Manuel Mujica Lainez (Author), Gregory Rabassa (Translator), Àlvaro Enrigue (Introduction by)

"[Bomarzo] is a novel that will make any reader happy.... [A] novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around." --Roberto Bolaño

A lavishly written gothic historical fantasy novel that centers around Pier Francesco Orsini, the tortured duke of Bomarzo and creator of the Italian town's famously bizarre "Garden of the Monsters."

Forty miles north of Rome, near the village of Bomarzo, Pier Francesco Orsini created a park of monstrous statuary in which the nightmares of the Renaissance stand preserved in stone. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez--one of the major Argentine novelists of the twentieth century--re-creates the dark and legendary duke as a briliant memoirist. From beyond the grave, in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez's own Buenos Aires, Orsini--who now knows his Freud and has read Lolita--looks back at the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life.

Bomarzo is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of a hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain. It is also a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it is an immersive story told in a sumptuous style--like one of Poe's Italian tales rewritten by Proust--as Gregory Rabassa's translation beautifully conveys.

Author Biography

Manuel Mujica Láinez (1910-1984) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina--a city that one of his ancestors had helped to found. It was also the city where he was raised, though with long periods away in Paris and London, where he studied French and English. Not long after returning to Argentina, he dropped out of law school to pursue a career as a writer. Several of his novels revolve around the history of Buenos Aires, though he is perhaps best remembered for a fantasy novel, The Wandering Unicorn (1965), and Bomarzo (1962), which was awarded the John F. Kennedy Prize.

Gregory Rabassa (1922-2016) was born in Yonkers, New York. One of the most respected translators of his generation, he brought the work of many writers into English--among them Machado de Assis, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa. He was the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Gregory Kolovakos Award, and the first National Book Award in Translation.

Álvaro Enrigue has been a fellow in the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de México, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, and the program in Latin American studies at Princeton University. He is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, among them Sudden Death, Now I Surrender, and You Dreamed of Empires. He teaches at Hofstra University.