Novel
Horses into the Night
Cavalls cap a la fosca
Baltasar Porcel · 1975
Synopsis
One autumn afternoon, in his Paris flat, a writer whose name we are not told looks into the origins of his family, the Vadell line, from a village in Majorca. Nested tales go back from the end of the seventeenth century to a recent period: a title of nobility possibly usurped, piracy, smuggling, the Inquisition, vendettas, murders, adulteries and the madness of the ancestors. The family coat of arms, three gold horses on a black field, gives the book its title, and the narrator also seeks his father in it.
Context
The novel appeared in Catalan in 1975. It proceeds through nested narratives on two levels of time, the writer's present afternoon and the fragmentary evocation of his family, drawn from documents, legends and archives. It belongs to the cycle that makes Andratx a closed, mythical world, inspired by postwar Majorca and marked by fatality, nature and family ties. Mathilde Bensoussan translated it into French from Actes Sud in 1990, and John L. Getman into English for the University of Arkansas Press.
Who it is for
Nested stories, without chronology, which are read almost separately; it helps to accept reconstructing the family little by little.
Prizes and reception
Prudenci Bertrana Prize in 1975, National Critics' Prize and Serra d'Or Prize in 1976, Internazionale Mediterraneo Prize in 1977.
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