Böcker av Sergio Pitol

The long-awaited English-language translation debut of Mexican literary maestro Sergio Pitol's 1984 Herralde Prize-winning novel, which paints a riotous picture of a wartime Mexico City filled with refugees and intelligentsia - and murder.

"From the famous Mexican author, Sergio Pitol, comes his 1988 classic translated by George Henson. Taming the Divine Heron, tells the semi-autobiographical story of a novelist working on his newest masterpiece. The protagonist struggles to tell the perfect story-his own, imagined protagonists mere imitations of the likes of Lord Jim and Alyosha Karamavoz. To help eradicate writer's block, Pitol uses his vessel to praise his own favorite authors. Pitol applauds Bakhtin's world building, Gogol's "carnivalesque [literary] breath", and Dante's dizzying intensity. The character finds a muse in Marietta Karapetiz who he aptly dubs Dante C. de la Estrella, and the two debate the literary greats. As the pair attempt to pull from the techniques of the world's best writers, Pitol creates a love letter to literature from around the globe while simultaneously telling his own magical story. To quote Pitol's protagonist, "the quality of the story, its effects, its brilliance, its intensity, ma[k]e the most absurd circumstances plausible". Taming of The Divine Heron, second in a trilogy including already-published The Love Parade (Deep Vellum, 2022), houses history, hyperrealism, myth, folklore, and memoir; to read Pitol is to appreciate the power of language"--

Debut work in English, a literary memoir, by Sergio Pitol, maestro of Mexican literature, winner of the 2005 Cervantes Prize.

In this Cervantes Prize-winner, fiction invades autobiography—and vice versa—as Pitol writes to forestall the advancement of degenerative memory loss.