Locos: A Comedy of Gestures

The interconnected stories that form this novel take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 Arabian Nights and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young author. “For them,” he complains, “reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply love it and make for it against my almost heroic opposition.”

First published in 1936 and long neglected, this elegantly inventive novel anticipates works like Pale Fire and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Locos, Felipe Alfau creates a mercurial dreamscape in which the characters-the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo’s Cafe of the Crazy–wrench free of authorial control, invade one another’s stories, and even turn into one another.