The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell (Margellos World Republic of Letters)

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.

A modern Spanish masterpiece by one of the most extraordinary novelists of our time

A masterpiece by one of the most extraordinary writers of the twentieth century, this novel explores the identity and destiny of beloved Spanish poet García Lorca, who finds himself in hell watching his entire life replayed—but not as it happened.

Carlos Rojas is a novelist, an art historian, and since the age of fifty a creator of visual works of art. He was born in Barcelona and came to the United States as a young man. In 1960 he joined the faculty of Emory University, where he is now Charles Howard Candler Professor of Spanish Emeritus. He has received numerous important Spanish literary prizes, including the Premio Nadal. He lives in Atlanta, GA. Edith Grossman has translated into English many works by major Latin American and Peninsular writers, garnering an array of awards and honors.