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David Toscana Mexico
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David Toscana, considered one of the most important contemporary voices in Mexican literature, was born in 1961 and lives in Mexico and Poland. In 2003, he was guest of the Writers in Residence Programme in Berlin (DAAD). Toscana is a contributing writer at The New York Times and has been awarded an impressive number of prestigious literary prizes. The Last Reader was shortlisted for Latin America’s most important literary award, the Rómulo Gallegos, and his novel Olegaroy has won the the Xavier Villaurrutia Award for Writers 2017 and the Premio Iberoamericano de Novela Elena Poniatowska 2018.
There are ostensibly small
men who become big when faced with the arbitrariness of history. Olegaroy is one of them. Olegaroy is in his mid-fifties and lives
with his mother in Monterrey. He suffers from insomnia, on account of which he
is obsessed with mattresses. One night, upon once again stealing his
neighbour's newspaper, he reads about the murder of a young woman and begins to
study the case. The protagonist‘s mother, along with a mathematician, a
prostitute whom Olegaroy plans to
marry and a priest, make up the unusual cast of characters for this story in
which Olegaroy generates ideas and
actions that will later be resumed by the noblest figures of science and
thought in history. Seemingly naive questions turn to universal repercussions
in this thriller, satire and love story, which confronts the reader with the
doubts that have plagued human beings since the days of ancient Greece. An incredibly funny and profound novel.
A playful and comic novel of enormous
stylistic daring and philosophical depth. It is a major work that demystifies the
celebrities of the intellectual world and rethinks, with an astonishing
handling of irony, the links between knowledge and everyday experience.
The jury of the Elena Poniatowska Prize
Toscana is the most Cervantes of authors for making
his hallucinated characters the true descendants of Don Quixote. A great novel.
El Norte
This is what great literature does: it convinces us
of the existence of giants that look like windmills.
Milenio
In his new
novel Gospeless (“Evangelia”),
Toscana parodies the biblical story of Jesus by taking the known events
literally, exploring their trivial dimension and so retracing the life of
another Messiah. Everything begins with a divine error: Mary gives birth to a
girl, Emmanuel. The three Magi are appalled and abruptly leave with their
gifts. The heavens are perplexed. The Archangel Gabriel tries again with Mary,
but to no avail: she is already expecting a child of Joseph, this time a son,
whom she intends to call James. Later on, Joseph passes James off as his
first-born, so he can take over the role of saviour. James - as Jesus - wanders
through the country with his half-sister and their respective followers
preaching until Emmanuel is crucified and James ensures that her name is
extinguished from biblical tradition. With its parodic reinterpretation of the
gospel, Toscana succeeds in presenting an intensely enjoyable work that goes
well beyond a merely provocative gesture, because the female Messiah stands
also for the unfulfilled revolutionary potential of Christ.
A delirious epistle, a snub to the supporters of a too literal interpretation
of the sacred texts.
Le
Monde Des Livres
Gospeless turns out to be a
finely crafted comical undertaking, between fervour and irony.
Magazine
Littéraire
A feminist book, crazy and comical.
Transfuge
With The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,
Saramago dared to question even the divine commandment; in Evangelia David
Toscana has dared even more.
Milenio
Toscana meets the expectations for an extraordinary
novel, certainly the most daring, endearing as all his books.
El Norte
The narrative is very agile and seizes smiles with
its humour.
La Jornada
Toscana is one of our country’s greatest novelists,
an author who has reached his finest moment. He has dared even more than
Saramago in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
Milenio
Toscana belongs to the most innovative and
imaginative authors of recent Mexican literature. Gospeless
(“Evangelia”) is a tremendously entertaining novel, solid and poetic, the
product of a powerful imagination linked to a no less implacable capacity for
reflection.
Siempre
The City That Was Carried Away by the Devil (“La ciudad que el diablo se llevó”) tells the story
of four friends who try to get by in 1945 Warsaw, selling looted goods or
burying corpses in the cemetery. Then one of them is arrested… As they are drawn
into a maelstrom of bizarre coincidences, they finally manage to leave the
abominable city behind. Writing with a good dose of irony, Toscana once again
makes the reader believe that the weirdest things are perfectly normal.
David Toscana writes with such skill that the
city’s heart beats for each and every one of those who venture to read his new
novel.
Milenio
An anthem to life and hope.
Excelsior
In his
novel, The Bridges of Königsberg
("Los puentes de Königsberg
"), David Toscana interweaves several stories into a lyrical and romantic
hymn to the transitory nature of beauty and the cruelty of war. The author
contrasts scenes in his home of Monterrey with the tragic fall of Königsberg,
both cities' names meaning "mountain of the king", at the end of
World War II. Yet this is not a juxtaposition in the
classic sense; the two levels flow together in an inimitable way, the two towns
superimposed upon one another like a double projection.
We start
with Floro and Blasco, two unemployed drinkers playing war games in a
construction ditch. At the same time, there are Mexicans actually fighting for
the Allies on the front. But these two men are no longer needed. With a gun in
your hand, Floro comments, it is easy to feel like a man: 'The difficult thing
in our times is going through life unarmed.' So there is no other option for
them but to lose themselves in daydreams. They start tracing the case of six
schoolgirls kidnapped several years ago, who are now considered dead. Their
almost erotic enthusiasm for the missing girls grows and grows. They even
fantasise themselves into the role of the kidnappers.
While the
parents don't give up looking for their daughters, one of the kidnapped girls' brother is secretly in love with his teacher Seńorita
Andrea. She had set her class an unsolvable problem going back to the
mathematician Euler: to cross the seven bridges of Königsberg in such a way
that each one was crossed once and only once. When the boy claims he has found
a solution Andrea is indignant, but from then on she regularly meets up with
him on the only bridge in Monterrey, representing a different bridge of
Königsberg every time. Through stories from the city's past, the teacher draws
the boy deeper and deeper into her world.
Despite all
its irony, the novel, inspired by Gustav Mahler's Songs on the Death of
Children, strives for romantic glorification, and attacks men's war games,
from which always women suffer, becoming a wistful song of remembering. Toscana
passes Euler's problem on to his readers, inviting us to cross the bridges of
Königsberg over and over again. There is no one way, no single clear solution. Only the attempt.
From his first books, David Toscana has been betting on imagination as topic, as style and as narrative strategy.
Revista de la Universidad de México
The Bridges of Königsberg, a neat, frenzied and exquisite fantasy where history, theatre, epic, myth and periodism come together.
Nexus
The Illuminated Army (“El ejército
iluminado”) sees the suspended teacher Matus running a marathon in his
little town in the deepest province of north Mexico. A man in the wrong place
at the wrong time who never had the chance to compete for a medal, he now uses
all his energy to retrieve it for himself from the widow of a North American
Olympic champion of 1924.
Neither was
the patriotic Matus granted to restore justice and reclaim the territory north
of the Río Bravo, nowadays Texas, for the Mexican realm. Only his mentally
handicapped pupils may follow him when he hangs up an outdated map or sets off
towards the North with an old boneshaker where he intends to fight the decisive
battle. Together with the plump Comodoro
and his friends he manages to cross the torrent and even occupy one of the
enemy’s command centres, at least for a few hours. Then however, it comes to
losses, they have to surrender and a hardly heroic return home follows, which
in reality is only a few miles down the road.
David Toscana
deserves to be labelled as the Latin-American Cervantes of the 21st century! The
Illuminated Army is like a little Quijote.
Rodrigo Argüello, El Tiempo
The Last Reader (“El último lector “) again
revolves around the death of a girl: In Icamole, an abandoned town in the
desert-like North of Mexico, bachelor Remigio finds her in his well and falls
strangely in love with her. He only tells his father Lucio about it. While the
police investigate the death of the little girl, Lucio, a librarian and the
last reader of Icamole, searches for explanations in literature. He reads the
books he likes while feeding the others to the cockroaches. This novel
proves David Toscana to be one of our best narrators. (Milenio) In “The
Last Reader” Toscana demonstrates what true literature is. (Vértigo).
The author has been awarded three literary awards
for this novel: The National Colima Prize, the José Fuentes Mares and
the Antonin Artaud Prize. El último lector was also
shortlisted for Latin America’s most important literary award, the Rómulo
Gallegos.
In
The Last Reader Toscana demonstrates what true literature is.
Vértigo
One closes the
book with a sensation of exquisite giddiness that one encounters very rarely.
Espaces Latinos
Toscana proves
that he has listened closely to the lessons of the two great Latin American
masters of illusion, Borges and Onetti.
Lire
To put it bluntly, Miguel Pruneda has had enough in Mourning for Miguel Pruneda (“Duelo por Miguel Pruneda”). Enough of his job as an administrative official, enough of his wife
Estela who infests the bathroom with lavender-trees, enough of life, basically.
But his thirty-year’s service jubilee is about to be celebrated and the local
newspaper would like to honour him by publishing a portrait. Miguel’s flight
from life and from reality begins, as in his childhood days, with a visit to
the cemetery.
The graves and crypts of many of the dead have
always exerted a great fascination on him, and so Miguel gets himself, and an
illustrious group of other people, involved in a bizarre detective game, in
which identities become blurred and the murmurings of the dead are scarcely
distinguishable from those of the living. And so it happens that Miguel, along
with his acquaintances Hugo and Monica (author of the laudatio), Faustino
(journalist), Horacio (neighbour) and his wife, embalm the deceased
entrepreneur José Videgaray in his bath-tub, because he did not wish to be
buried. And so it happens too, that Miguel takes a plastic bag full of bones
home with him, the remains of little Irenita; the girl had been raped and then
murdered and Miguel does not wish to leave her bones to themselves. It also
happens that, together, the dead and the living re-enact a plane crash in
Miguel's living-room, and Estela exchanges her good brown dress for a good
green one.
Absurd on the surface and altogether funny, Mourning for Miguel Pruneda also plays a highly
complicated cat-and-mouse game with the reader, who repeatedly tries to pit
rational means against the apparent madness of a handful of figures whose
normal lives have become meaningless.
Toscana is a
master at interweaving the tragic and the tender, black humour and delicate
irony, love and hurt. The world of his protagonists is set in the imagination
and takes a bizarre form when coming into contact with reality. And reality is
miserable in the stories told in Lontananza. One sits there with the men
who meet in the bar Lontananza in the evening, fleeing from the monotony
at home, and listens to their stories which have a novel-like quality. A great little book.
Toscana’s
novel, Tula Station (“Estación
Tula”), is based on a real event: after a fierce hurricane, Froylán
Gómez’ car is found in a river; the man himself is considered to have perished.
Years later, his wife comes across a pile of papers and on reading them
discovers that Froylán has availed himself of the opportunity to disappear with
his mistress. So she asks her friend David Toscana to go through the papers to
see if he can make anything worthwhile out of them. The result is Tula Station, a novel about a triangular
relationship, about longing and passion; the story of the eager orphan Juan
Capistrán in search of adventure and heroism; and not least a
homage to the little town of Tula that has a railway station which no
train has ever stopped at.
As in Tula
Station, “a hipnotic
novel” (New York Times) with its search for adventure and heroism, the life of
the eight circus performers in Our Lady
of the Circus (“Santa María del
Circo”) is even more allegorical. Don Alejo and the members of his
circus stumble upon a deserted town. Intrigued by the notion of living a normal
life, they decide to establish a community.
The press about Our Lady of the Circus:
Toscana’s achievement is his ability to make the
reader fall madly in love with the characters.
Book Magazine
A
one-man-show. Toscana is
set to rise in the ranks of the most important Latin American writer.
Kirkus
He combines some of the greatest features of ‘A
Hundred Years of Solitude’. A comparison that is anything but derogatory!
Toscana tells the complete history of a world and its demise. In a witty yet poetic language.
The ABC
Cultural
Rights:
Novels:
Olegaroy
Mexico City: Alfaguara 2017, 311 p.
Xavier Villaurrutia Award
2017
Among the lists of best
books of 2017 of Nexos y Langosta
literaria
Italy: Gran Via
Gospeless (“Evangelia”)
Mexico City: Alfaguara 2016, 332 p.
Number
1 in the lists of best books of 2016 of Siempre!
and Milenium
France: Zulma 2018 ● Portugal:
Parsifal 2017
The City That Was Carried Away by the
Devil (“La ciudad que el diablo se llevó”)
Mexico City: Alfaguara 2012, 266 p.
Italy: Gran Via
2015 ● Portugal:
Parsifal 2015
The
Bridges of Königsberg (“Los puentes de Königsberg”)
Mexico City: Alfaguara 2009, 242 p.
Brazil: Casa da
Palavra 2012
The Enlightened Army (“El
ejército iluminado”)
Mexico City: Tusquets 2006, 233 p.
English translation
available
Premio de Narrativa José María
Arguedas 2008
Film rights under option
Brazil: Casa da Palavra 2007 ● Croatia: Bozicevic 2015 ● France: Zulma 2012 ● Kuwait: Alsurra ● Portugal: Parsifal 2014 ● USA: University of Texas
Press 2019
The Last Reader (“El último
lector”)
Mexico City: Random House 2004, 192 p.
English translation
available
Shortlisted for the
Rómulo Gallegos Prize
Brazil: Casa da Palavra 2005 ● France: Zulma 2009, pb 2013 ● India:
DC Books 2013 ● Italy: Ed. Riuniti 2007 ● Kuwait: Alsurra
2018 ● Poland: Bertelsmann 2010 ● Portugal: Oficina do Livro 2008 ● Slovak Republic: Belimex 2005 ● Sweden: Boca/Atlas 2009 ● Turkey:
Kirmizi Kedi 2011 ● USA: Texas Tech University Press 2009
Mourning for Miguel Pruneda (“Duelo por
Miguel Pruneda”)
Mexico City: Random House 2002, 219p.
Sweden: Boca/ Pocky 2006
Our Lady of the Circus (“Santa María del
Circo”)
Mexico City: Random House 1998, 288 p.
Included by Publishers Weekly in its annual
review “The Year in Books 2001”
Feature Film by Guilherme Weber
Brazil: Casa da Palavra 2006 ● Portugal: Oficina do Livro 2010 ● USA: St. Martin's Press 2001
Tula Station (“Estación
Tula”)
Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz 1995, 272 p.
Film rights under option
France: Zulma 2010 ● Germany: Wolfgang Krüger 1998 ● Greece: Opera 1999 ●
Serbia&Montenegro: Narodna Knjiga 2005 ● Syria: At-Taquee 2003 ● USA: St. Martin's Press 1999 (avail.)
Stories:
Lontananza
Buenos Aires: Random House 2003, 115 p.
English sample
translation available
Participation in anthologies:Vamos a leerGermany: dtv 2018(Excerpt of Lontananza)
La Frontera – Die mexikanisch-US-amerikanische
Grenze und ihre Künstler
Frankfurt
am Main: Faust Kultur 2014
Antologia
Pan-americana
Rio de Janeiro: Record 2010