Alberto Ruy Sánchez

«Tiene raz n Octavio Paz al se alar a Ruy S nchez como uno de los mejores ensayistas contempor neos. Cada uno de sus textos tiene la riqueza narrativa de una novela y la inteligencia anal tica para se alar los temas fundamentales de nuestro tiempo. -Claude-Michel Cluny Catorce ensayos narrativos sobre c mo viven grandes escritores la melancol a y c mo la enfrentan creativamente. Escritores que son claves de toda la obra de Ruy S nchez --Rilke en Par s, Yourcenar, Pasolini, Calvino, Beckett, Frisch, Hugo, Savinio-- son le dos como grandes catedrales g ticas. En otros mbitos, gracias a llevar la literatura en el cuerpo sobreviven a las opresiones g ticas del totalitarismo contempor neo Zamiatin y Orwell, Istrati, Herling, Shostakovich y Nadiezhda Mandelstam. Dos tumbas g ticas de sus maestros, Michel Foucault y Roland Barthes, cierran el par ntesis que abri en el libro con una introducci n sobre la naturaleza del ensayo, donde el mismo Roland Barthes ofrece la primera lecci n vital de pensamiento y escritura. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION A dialogue with the inhabitants of the great melancholic dream of the twentieth century. Sixteen narrative essays written with the prose that defines Alberto Ruy S nchez, revisits a protagonist--melancholy--that acts by the self and vindicates the body. The essays are divided in three sections. The first one, "Memories of Gothic Cathedrals," discusses the life and work of writers possessed by forces that overcome them, and for whom the vortex of living is visible in their work: Rilke, Alberto Savinio, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Marguerite Yourcenar, Samuel Beckett, Max Frisch, and Victor Hugo. The second part, "Memories of Gothic Prisons," gathers writers under the destructive effect of dictatorial regimes. Those who survive bare the imprint of a shadow on their skin: Mikhail Shostakovich, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Eugeny Zamiatin, Geroge Orwell, Panait Istrati, Herling, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn. The third part, "Memories of Gothic Tombs," addresses writers we lost while this book was being written. Each essay is a tombstone, a line onto them: Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.

«Alberto Ruy S nchez es la mejor carta que tiene la literatura mexicana y una de las mejores de nuestra lengua. -Octavio Paz ste es un libro escrito sobre la piel, como un tatuaje ritual del deseo. En nueve cap tulos de nueve fragmentos cada uno, escuchamos leyendas sobre el origen de Mogador dentro de nuestra piel, sobre la conducta peculiar de la luz y el tiempo entre sus murallas, sobre los m todos que all usan para cantar sus historias, sobre la severa dictadura de la piel, el sabor de las palabras, las bibliotecas sorpresivas y la m sica elemental del cuerpo. Termina, como es natural, con una descripci n de la extra sima forma anat mica del sexo en esa ciudad, como si fuera otro cerebro que los son mbulos de Mogador desarrollan y usan a su manera. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION This book brings together nine chapters where we get to know the origin of Mogador. Nine things are said nine times in Mogador. Eighty-one rumors, dreams, and legends evoke the city of desire and bring her sensual mystery back again and again. From this amazing cartography of desire emerges an island, a cloud, a dune, and a walled city: Mogador: Is she a city or a woman? Is she real or only an erotic dream? Here, Ruy S nchez weaves tales of the city's origins and describes the peculiar behavior of light and time inside her walls, and the methods its inhabitants use to sing and tell their story.

Villaurrutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel Set in an imaginary walled city off the coast of Morocco, Mogador traces the days and nights of Fatma, a young woman who finds herself suddenly seized by desire. As she wanders the city's maze of erotic pleasures, she encounters other desiring bodies and the desperate worlds those desires create. Here is a vital fusion of Latin America magical realism with Arabic geometric and mystical imagery, written in a style the author calls a "prose of intensities." "This extremely talented Mexican writer...assumes is own Islamic roots in one of the best-written novels of recent years. He is truly a painter of dreams, who manages to fuse the most unblemished sensuality with the most transparent spirituality." -Luce Lopez Baralt "Memorable novella about being both untouched and seized-all described in prose that mixes dreamy arabesque with crystalline precision." -Kirkus Review "Ruy Sanchez balances a double paradox: his novella about female desire, written by a man, criticizes Islamic and Latin-American concepts of male dominance. It's a dazzling philosophical conundrum - a Sphinx-like riddle that only a king or a poet could solve. In any event, the pervasive desire in Mogador is particularized: it's the calling out of one body to another, one spirit to another, one soul to another...This infatuating novella is not about eroticism; it's about love." -William Hollinger, Boston Review Alberto Ruy Sanchez has written many works of fiction as well as literary and art criticism. He was an editor of Octavo Paz's Vuelta and is now editor and chief of Artes de Mexico. Mark Schafer has translated works by Virgilio Piniera and, with Cedric Belfrage, and The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano.