Book Description | This novel was written in about five months, about thirty years ago. Neither the publishers nor I had high commercial expectations for it, and in an unexpected way that was first gradual, then very accelerating over the course of a year, it turned into a huge success. In retrospect, it's quite easy to predict things.
But what is certain is that when the novel won the National Prize, in 1988, in the heart of the Madrid Book Fair, there were no copies of it in any outlet, as I was able to ascertain myself, and not without regret in all this time I only revisited it once. When it was necessary to review a translation into English, it gave me a huge impression of strangeness. Since that reading, a long time has also passed. I haven't re-read it even as I've been writing, all this past year, another novel that has a lot to do with it, also partly set in Lisbon, and involving a recollection of who I was and my ideas about literature at that time. |