Farabeuf or, The Chronicle of an Instant

A '60s Mexican cult masterpiece, Farabeuf is an enigmatic vision of the French surgeon L.H. Farabeuf’s curious existence, from his morbidly erotic obsessions to his life as an inventor of grisly surgical instruments, an amateur photographer, and possibly even a spy in occupied Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion. With patience and purpose, Salvador Elizondo’s sensual prose brilliantly constructs, explores, and proceeds to annihilate the boundaries between pain and pleasure, love and lust, reality and longing—between our individual and collective identities.

In many ways a Latin American response to the work being done by European writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Farabeuf is at once single-minded in its intensity and nearly limitless in its possible interpretations, at times shocking and savage, at others sensuous and poetic. An unsung masterpiece of Spanish-language literature, now made available again in English on the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication.