Manuel Mujica Lainez’s spellbinding novel of gothic historical fantasy, ‘Bomarzo’

“[Bomarzo] is a novel that will make any reader happy.... It’s a novel about art and a novel about decadence, about the luxury of writing novels and about the exquisite uselessness of the novel.... And of course it’s also a novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around.” —Roberto Bolaño BOMARZO Manuel Mujica Lainez Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa Introduction by Álvaro Enrigue Forty miles north of Rome, near the village of Bomarzo, Pier Francesco Orsini created a park of monstrous statuary in which the nightmares of the Renaissance stand preserved in stone. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez—one of the major Argentine novelists of the twentieth century—re-creates this dark and legendary duke as a brilliant memoirist. From beyond the grave, in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez's own Buenos Aires, Orsini—who now knows his Freud and has read Lolita—looks back at the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life. Bomarzo is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of a hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain. It is also a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it is an immersive story told in a sumptuous style—like one of Poe's Italian tales rewritten by Proust—as Gregory Rabassa's translation beautifully conveys. “When the true history of our literature—and not an apology for it—comes to be written, Manuel Mujica Lainez will at last be seen as a benefactor. He brings back to contemporary writing the sense of destiny, of adventure with its hopes and fears, the tradition of Stevenson, Hugo, and—why not?—Ariosto.... An attentive reader of the great Russians and of Henry James, Mujica Lainez gives us that special delight of intimate portraiture, of watching the gradual unfolding of personality.” —Jorge Luis Borges BUY THE BOOK   For three days only, Bomarzo is available at 25% off along with three other works of Argentine literature: ZAMA Antonio Di Benedetto BUY THE BOOK THE INVENTION OF MOREL Adolfo Bioy Casares BUY THE BOOK THUS WERE THEIR FACES Silvina Ocampo BUY THE BOOK You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can choose the types of mailings you wish to receive: Update preferences   New York Review Books 207 East 32nd Street New York, NY 10016-6305 Not a subscriber? Sign up for our newsletter here. Unsubscribe