Temperature

Original Title: Temperatura

Trabal is one of the few Catalan novelists who have been capable of obtaining the unanimous judgement of the critics. Thus, Temperature (Mexico, 1947) is invariably regarded as “the last of his novels,” “the best” and, at the same time, “the least successful.” None of the critics who have written about it have failed to recognise it as the most ambitious work by this tightrope-walking, snobbish and arbitrary author, with his grotesque, absurd and banal humour. Some more, some less, they have all declared it to be a novel that is fantastic, crazy, gratuitous, over-long but extremely amusing, a tour de force which, with a view to offering a disenchanted, tragic vision of the human couple, ends up falling into the sack of the purest science fiction with a magnificent display of literary and cinematographic technical effects. If to this we add the fact that Trabal committed the indecency of writing it in exile, as if the disaster of the Spanish Civil War had never happened, it is easy enough to understand why he himself declared that “only a writer could be capable of possessing the heroism required to publish Temperature after reading it.”

Discover other books from Francesc Trabal

• 

  Waltz

• 

  She Was Just Another Woman

• 

  Quo Vadis, Sanchez?

• 

  Some Men Cry because the Sun Sets

• 

  The Man Who Got Lost

Details

Quaderns Crema

January 1986

1 pages

Novel