Tyrant Banderas
Book (italiano):
The first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the<br> avowed inspiration for García Márquez's <i>The Autumn of the</i><br> <i>Patriarch </i>and Roa Bastos's <i>I, the Supreme</i>, <i>Tyrant Banderas</i><br> is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American<br> Republic in the grip of a monster. Valle-Inclán, one of the<br> masters of Spanish modernism, combines the splintered points<br> of view of a cubist painting with the campy excesses of 19thcentury<br> serial fiction to paint an astonishing picture of a ruthless<br> tyrant facing armed revolt.<br><br> It is the Day of the Dead, and revolution has broken out, creating<br> mayhem from Baby Roach's Cathouse to the Harris Circus<br> to the deep jungle of Tico Maipú. The tyrant steps forth,<br> assuring all that he is in favor of freedom of assembly and<br> democratic opposition. Meanwhile, his secret police lock up,<br> torture, and execute students and Indian peasants in a sinister<br> castle by the sea where even the sharks have tired of a diet of<br> revolutionary flesh. Then the opposition strikes back. They<br> besiege the dictator's citadel, hoping to bring justice to a downtrodden,<br> starving populace.<br><br> Peter Bush's new translation of Valle-Inclán's seminal novel,<br> the first into English since 1929, reveals a writer whose tragic<br> sense of humor is as memorably grotesque and disturbing as<br> Goya's in his <i>The Disasters of War</i>.
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