The Scale of Maps - Softcover

Gopegui, Belén

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087286510X ISBN 13: 9780872865105

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2011

Synopsis

Sergio Prim is a staid, middle-aged geographer. The romantic advances of Brezo Varela, a lively young woman who shares his profession, induce a series of terrifying hallucinations from which he attempts to seek refuge by immersing himself in the quest to map a place in which love never results in disillusionment. A lyrical examination of language, imagination and desire.

Belén Gopegui burst onto the Spanish literary scene in 1993, bowling over critics with her masterful debut La escala de los mapas (The Scale of Maps), which was hailed as a masterpiece. This is her first work translated into English.

About this title

About the Author:

Belén Gopegui was born in Madrid in October 1963. In 1993, she burst onto the Spanish literary scene with her first novel, La escala de los mapas [The Scale of Maps]. Her masterful debut bowled over critics, winning both the Tigre Juan Prize and the “Santiago del Nuevo Extremo” Iberoamerican Prize for First Novel. Since then, Gopegui has published six more novels, and her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Turkish, Serbian, Finnish and Dutch.

Mark Schafer is a literary translator and visual artist who lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts and teaches Spanish and Translation at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Schafer has translated novels, short stories, essays and poetry by other Latin American authors including Gloria Gervitz, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Jesús Gardea, Eduardo Galeano and Antonio José Ponte. Schafer has received numerous grants and awards for his translations, including the Robert Fitzgerald Prize and two Translation Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Schafer edited and translated the anthology Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poetry of David Huerta, which was published in January 2009 by Copper Canyon Press.

Review:

"A geographer falls irredeemably in love with a flighty mapmaker in this graceful, peculiar Spanish tale . . . beautifully composed and elegantly translated." --Publishers Weekly

"Map scales are about relationships. So is "The Scale of Maps," a poignant, provocative, profound and passionate book by respected Spanish writer Belén Gopegui." --The Kansas City Star

"'Trembling' is how protagonist Sergio Prim first appears to the reader. 'His hands fluttered like a bashful magician's,' the Spaniard Belen Gopegui writes of her fictional creation. Gopegui's first novel, The Scale of Maps, is a story about a magic trick that Prim never quite masters, an ambitious disappearing act that ends in irredeemable failure. After all, as another character, the enchanting mapmaker Brezo Varela, warns Prim, 'the problem with escape artists is that they never escape.' . . . Who is this strange man charting a fantastical, solitary course? Gopegui has been compared to Cervantes and Nabokov, and it's easy to see Prim as a kind of windmill-battling Pnin. Prim's labyrinthine imaginings could easily place him in a work of Borges as well. . . . Mark Schafer's agile translation gives Prim the fitting voice of a polished academic who has lost his bearings. 'The man who examines his own love is like the merchant who sells perishable foods,' Prim suggests inscrutably. Is the reader to understand that Prim's survival depends on his ability to shill the ripened fruits of his passion before they spoil? And to whom is he selling the harvest of his inspection? It's just one of many alluring metaphors that quietly collapse upon inspection, evading scrutiny." --Words without Borders

"It's an ambitious novel, to be sure, made beautiful by Gopegui's liquid prose, and made accessible by her ultimate refusal to answer her own questions." --Janet Potter, Bookslut

About this edition

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 087286510X
• ISBN 13: 9780872865105
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 223