The Man Who Got Lost

Original Title: L'home que es va perdre

Lluís Frederic Picàbia loses the promise. A little later, he loses his cigar case. Later still, ten umbrellas, a wristwatch, a comb belonging to his mother (may she rest in peace), three cameras, eighteen walking sticks, two monocles, a suitcase, four raincoats, thirteen pipes, three briefcases, a secretary: Miss Virgili… Losing becomes a profession in which Picàbia works wonders: a twenty-four storey block on Fifth Avenue, New York; three elephants on the shores of a river; one thousand eight hundred Fords in Honduras, in the middle of a motor-racing track; five thousand Chinese children in Tampico (Mexico); the Swedish crown jewels…

Praises

“One of the most cosmopolitan luxuries we have enjoyed in the last century.”
Quim Monzó

“Like the great conjurors, Trabal throws a boy, a girl, a weighty book, a safe, a transatlantic liner, a cigarette case, a feminist’s smile, and a criminal’s false teeth into a top hat. Then he mixes it all together as his audience watches. Out come streams of clear, colourful, elastic prose, the silken ribbons of every colour that great magicians can make fly through the air.”
Josep Maria de Sagarra

“There are so many good things one can say about Trabal! The freedom with which he invents impossible scenes that he mixes with reality, like in the novels of Boris Vian and Jean Echenoz... Don’t ever get tired of rereading him. With a writer like Trabal, one always finds new things, some of which are prodigiously heralded ahead of their times.”
Julià Guillamón, La Vanguardia

Discover other books from Francesc Trabal

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  Waltz

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  She Was Just Another Woman

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  Quo Vadis, Sànchez?

• 

  Some Men Cry because the Sun Sets

• 

  Temperature

Details

Quaderns Crema

January 1982

1 pages

Novel

Translation Rights

France (Les Éditions Autrement)
Italian (Robin Edizioni)