Siege in the Room: Three Novellas

By Miquel Bauçà

Book Overview

This volume brings together three short novels by Catalan literature's great maverick and recluse, each depicting a brutal, abstract world where words are the only reality--shifting between the erudite, the archaic, and the vulgar. Carrer Marsala, which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya--neither of which Bau bothered to accept--is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with dental hygiene, sex, and his own squalid rooms in Barcelona. In The Old Man, the narrator observes a strange building where a decrepit prisoner is ritually beaten by a policeman once a week. The Warden details the narrator's own captivity, and his relationship with the woman who keeps him prisoner. In Martha Tennent's haunting translation, reminiscent of a Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, Miquel Bau 's work is a pungent reminder of the ways the world fails its prophets and pariahs.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564787702
• ISBN13: 9781564787705
• Release Date: July 2012
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 149 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher