Bomarzo

＂[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.

Manuel Mujica Láinez (1910-1984) was an Argentine novelist, translator, and critic. He is the author of a series of novels known as the Buenos Aires cycle, which portray the city through a combination of historical veracity and fantasy. He shared with Julio Cortázar the 1964 John F. Kennedy medal and received the Legion of Honor from the French government in 1982.

Gregory Rabassa (1922-2016) was a noted translator of Spanish and Portugeuse literature. He introduced the work of several acclaimed international writers to English-speaking audiences, among them Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, Machado de Assis, Mario Vargas Llosa, and perhaps most famously, Gabriel García Márquez, beginning with the author’s classic One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican novelist and essayist. His 2013 novel Sudden Death was awarded the Herralde Prize, the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award, and the Barcelona Prize for Fiction. His work has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, n+1, and London Review of Books. He teaches at Hofstra University and lives in New York City.