Chromos (American Literature) - Softcover

Alfau, Felipe; Felipe, Alfau

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564782042 ISBN 13: 9781564782045

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999

Synopsis

Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along - Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis. Chromos is the American immigration novel par excellence. Its opening line is: "The moment one learns English, complications set in." Or, as the novel illustrates, the moment one comes to America, the complications set in. The cast of characters in this book are immigrants from Spain who have one leg in Spanish culture and the other in the confusing, warped, unfriendly New World of New York City, attempting to meld two worlds that just won't fit together. Wildly comic, Chromos is also strangely apocalyptic, moving towards point zero and utter darkness.

About this title

About the Author:

Joseph Coates is the author of 2025: Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology.

From Library Journal:

This kaleidoscopic novel was written in 1948 and is here offered in English for the first time after the recent reissue of the same author's Locos ( LJ 2/1/89). The focus is on a group of "Americaniards," Spaniards residing in New York City who, although healthy back home, have become hypochondriacal and readily indulge in delusions of mediocrity. Typical is the writer Garcia, who is adept at loitering in a city remarkable for its absence of cafe life and who sells to lesser Latin American reviews an article invariably about New York, a short story invariably about Spain, or a poem invariably about himself. With the hapless narrator, Garcia shares long segments of his deliberately corny novel about a merchant family of Madrid whose third-generation males fall prey to sexual perversions. Richly aphoristic, with titillating digressions into mathematics and metaphysics and with many Spanish words left untranslated, this book represents intellectual fiction at its best.
- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1564782042
• ISBN 13: 9781564782045
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 348