Sanitary Centennial: And Selected Short Stories (Texas Pan American Series) (English and Spanish Edition) - Hardcover

Sorrentino, Fernando

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 029277608X ISBN 13: 9780292776081

Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr, 1988

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, Spanish (translation)

From Publishers Weekly:

With goodnatured humor, Argentine writer Sorrentino deflates pompous bureaucrats, advertising models, respectable swindlers, deliberately obscure poets, publicity seekers and self-deceiving snobs. To read him is to realize the extent to which our media-saturated environment is surfeited with half-truths, exaggerations, packaged personalities and phoniness. In the sometimes hilarious title novella, an advertising copywriter is assigned to write stirring hype trumpeting a toilet manufacturer's centennial, but he is not flushed with total success. The six short stories in this volume include parodies, fantasies, Kafkaesque fables. Simple tasks like fixing a lock become absurd, monstrous nightmares. The narrator of "In Self-Defense" bestows incredible gifts on his neighbora train, a mink coat, an armored tankto atone for a minor mishap, but each gift conceals a deadly trick. Is Sorrentino satirizing the indifference of neighbors, the rigidity of social conventions or the defensive mental armor we wear? It's impossible to tell, and in this ambiguity lies the story's haunting power. This sparkling translation makes available a writer who deserves a wide audience among English-language readers.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 029277608X
• ISBN 13: 9780292776081
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 186