Diary of a Humiliated Man

Reveals the diary of a man who has given up poetry for banality, striving to be totally ordinary and accomodating to any situation, in order to find out who he really is

Mordantly funny, at times horrifying, always invigorating, the first novel of this Spanish writer to appear in English benefits from a supple translation by Jones. Through eight months of dense diary entries, it recounts the distractions of an apparently mediocre man in post-Franco Barcelona who embraces banality and drifts on the tide of the city. But the diarist's piercing irony keeps his descent a sharply told, energetically written tour that sometimes resembles a Baedeker of the underworld as edited by James Joyce. Orphaned and living on a small inheritance, the narrator finds himself drifting to the sleazy night life of the Ramblas, where he encounters former mentors and eventually adopts a new one: an enigmatic usurer known as the Chinaman. Their relationship moves from adversarial to oddly co-dependent, as the diarist experiments with crime, slides into squalor and madness, is rescued by a jailhouse vision of materialism and an apotheosis of sex, has a final reckoning with his alter ego and ends up reconciled with his voice?the diary itself. This modern picaresque is a bracing change from the sometimes banal freeways of current American fiction.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Diary Of A Humiliated Man ($15.95 paperback original; Oct. 1996; 282 pp.; 1-57129-029-X): This perversely amusing portrayal of an introverted, self-torturing soul--which won Spain's Premio Herralde Prize in 1987--introduces to American readers a wry psychological novelist who views his disturbed protagonist from a refreshingly offbeat perspective. De Azua's nameless diarist, a sardonic loner whose vividly described family and acquaintances influence him to test the limits of both acceptable and legal behavior, finds himself unequal to the challenges of criminality and even iconoclasm, and consequently dedicates himself to the pursuit of (what he feels he was born for) ``banality.'' He's a memorable inversion of the classic outsider: a hilariously inept Iberian counterpart of Dostoyevsky's ``underground man.'' -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

For the many U.S. readers whose contact with banality is considerable but unconsidered, the detailed elaborations of it in this book may serve as a thematic introduction. The first-person narrator abandons poetry in pursuit of a "militant banality." He sets out to lose himself in the big city (Barcelona) in order to discover, with the help of his notebook, who he is. Being banal, for him, means being ordinary, the measure of nothing--or anything--and accommodating himself to anything at all. Ultimately, that leads him, usually while drunk, into dangerous and violent situations. But the main drama is his way of digesting such encounters in his notebook. His entries reveal a politically and culturally educated and critical mind that registers the horror of "absolute poverty" and the destructiveness of the city's "reticulated sects" of class and race; but his moral reaction to these is finally confined to a continued commitment to his cynical, learned, witty, and sometimes seemingly mad reflections in his notebook. Jim O'Laughlin

In de Azua's first novel available in English, a man "with pretensions to banality" spends his time reading, wandering the streets of Barcelona, drinking, thinking, having aimless sexual and underworld encounters, and recording his observations in a diary. Thankfully, because many readers would probably be happy to trade lives with him, the narrator does not descend into self-pity. Recalling Camus's The Fall (1956) and many works by Nabokov that have an erudite first-person narrator, the book resembles many other novels about superfluous antiheroes. Its narrator, however, is unpretentious, witty without being stagy, and tenderly satiric. Another plus are the well-translated, insightful descriptions of Barcelona and its society. This book was winner of Spain's Premio Herralde Prize in 1987. Recommended for informed readers.?Eric Howard, Pasadena, Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.