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David Toscana Mexico
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David Toscana, considered one of the most important new
voices in Mexican literature, was born in 1961 and lives and works in
Monterrey, Mexico and Warsaw, Poland. His books of short stories and his novels
have been translated into several languages. He was awarded an impressive
number of prestigious literary prizes. In 2003 Toscana was guest of the Writers
in Residence Programme in Berlin (DAAD) for one year.
Toscana’s second novel, 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 Estación Tula, 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 Estación Tula, “a hipnotic novel” (New York
Times) with its search for adventure and heroism, the life of the eight circus
performers in Santa María del Circo (“Our Lady of the Circus”) 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.
Press on Santa María del Circo:
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
In Duelo
por Miguel Pruneda (“Mourning for Miguel Pruneda”) Miguel has simply
had enough. Enough of his office job of 30 years, enough of his wife, enough of
life, basically. Despite his death notice having appeared in the local
newspaper, he roams around the cemetery quite lively and falls in love with a
girl whose bones he finds.
El último lector (“The last
Reader“) 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
“El último lector” 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 “El último lector” 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
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.
El ejército
iluminado (“The illuminated Army”) 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.
In his novel, Los puentes de Königsberg ("The Bridges of
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 Señorita
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
Los puentes de Königsberg, a neat, frenzied and exquisite fantasy where history, theatre, epic, myth and periodism come together.
Nexus
The
new novel La ciudad que
el diablo se llevó
(“The City That Was Carried Away by the Devil”) 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.
Original editions and rights sold:
Novels:
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 ● US: St. Martin's Press 1999 (avail.)
Santa María del
Circo, Mexico City: Random House 1998, 288 p.,
included by Publishers Weekly in its annual review “The
Year in Books 2001”
Film rights under option
Brazil: Casa da palavra 2006 ● Portugal: Oficina do Livro 2010 ● US: St. Martin's Press 2001
Duelo por Miguel Pruneda, Mexico City: Random House 2002, 219p.
Sweden:
Boca/ Pocky 2006
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 ● India:
DC Books ● Italy: Ed. Riuniti 2007 ● Poland: Bertelsmann 2010 ● Portugal: Oficina do Livro 2008 ● Slovak Republic: Belimex 2005 ● Sweden: Boca/Atlas 2009 ● Turkey:
Kirmizi Kedi 2011 ● US: Texas Tech University Press 2009
El ejército iluminado, Mexico City: Tusquets 2006, 233 p.
Film rights under option
Brazil: Casa da Palavra 2007 ● France: Zulma 2012
Los puentes de Königsberg, Mexico City: Alfaguara 2009, 242 p.
Brazil: Casa da Palavra
2012
La ciudad que el diablo se llevó, Mexico City, Alfaguara 2012, 266 p.
Stories:
Lontananza, Buenos Aires: Random House 2003, 115 p.
(sample translation in
English)
Participation in anthologies:
Antologia Pan-americana,
Rio de Janeiro, Record 2010, 373 p.