‘Sergio Pitol is not only our best active storyteller, he is also the bravest renovator of our literature.’—Álvaro Enrigue in Letras Libres
‘Pitol is probably one of Mexico’s most culturally complex and composite writers. He is certainly the strangest, most unfathomable, and eccentric. . . . [His] voice . . . reverberates beyond the margins of his books.’—Valeria Luiselli, author of Faces in the Crowd
‘Reading him, one has the impression . . . of being before the greatest writer in the Spanish language in our time.’—Enrique Vila-Matas
The Journey features one of the world’s master storytellers at work as he skillfully recounts two weeks of travel around the Soviet Union in 1986. From the first paragraph, Sergio Pitol dislocates the sense of reality, masterfully and playfully blurring the lines between fiction and fact.
This adventurous story, based on the author’s own travel journals, parades through some of the territories that the author lived in and traveled through (Prague, the Caucasus, Moscow, Leningrad) as he reflects on the impact of Russia’s sacred literary pantheon in his life and the power that literature holds over us all.
The Journey, the second work in Pitol’s remarkable ‘Trilogy of Memory’ (which Deep Vellum is publishing in its entirety), which won him the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2005 and inspired the newest generation of Spanish-language writers, represents the perfect example of one of the world’s greatest authors at the peak of his power.
Sobre o autor
Sergio Pitol Demeneghi is one of Mexico’s most acclaimed writers, born in the city of Puebla in 1933. He studied law and philosophy in Mexico City. He is renowned for his intellectual career in both the field of literary creation and translation, and is renowned for his work in the promotion of Mexican culture abroad, which he achieved during his long service as a cultural attaché in Mexican embassies and consulates across the globe. He has lived perpetually on the run: he was a student in Rome, a translator in Beijing and Barcelona, ??a university professor in Xalapa and Bristol, and a diplomat in Warsaw, Budapest, Paris, Moscow and Prague. Pitol is a contemporary of the most famous authors of the Latin American “Boom, ” and began publishing novels, stories, criticism, and translations in the 1960s. In recognition of the importance of his entire canon of work, Pitol was awarded the two most important prizes in the Spanish language world: the Juan Rulfo Prize in 1999 (now known as the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages), and in 2005 he won the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish language world, often called the “Spanish language Nobel.” Deep Vellum will publish Pitol’s Trilogy of Memory in full in 2014-2015 (The Art of Flight; The Journey; The Magician of Vienna), marking the first appearance of any of Pitol’s books in English.
George Henson is a senior lecturer of Spanish at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he is completing a Ph.D. in literary and translation studies. His translations, including works by Andre´s Neuman, Miguel Barnet, and Leonardo Padura, have appeared previously in World Literature Today. His translations of Elena Poniatowska’s
The Heart of the Artichoke and Luis Jorge Boone’s
The Cannibal Night were published in 2012 by Alligator Press.