Traveler of the Century
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Searching for an inn, the enigmatic traveler Hans stops in a small city on the border between Saxony and Prussia. The next morning, Hans meets an old organ-grinder in the market square and immediately finds himself enmeshed in an intense debate—on identity and what it is that defines us—from which he cannot break free.
Indefinitely stuck in Wandernburg until his debate with the organ-grinder is concluded, he begins to meet the various characters who populate the town, including a young freethinker named Sophie. Though she is engaged to be married, Sophie and Hans begin a relationship that defies contemporary mores about female sexuality and what can and cannot be said about it.
Traveler of the Century is a deeply intellectual novel, chock-full of discussions about philosophy, history, literature, love, and translation. It is a book that looks to the past in order to have us reconsider the conflicts of our present. The winner of Spain's prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Traveler of the Century marks the English-language debut of Andrés Neuman, a writer described by Roberto Bolaño as being "touched by grace."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the Argentina-born Neuman, winner of Spain's coveted Alfaguara and Nation Critics Prizes, comes this trenchant new novel. On his way to Wittenberg, dreamy young Hans is waylaid in the border town of Wandernburg and absorbed into the private dramas of a host of 19th-century types, from a kindly organ-grinder who lives as a hermit to the fetching Sophie, a writer/translator whose Romantic disposition quickly endears her to Hans. But the novel's centerpieces are the lively discussions at the local salon, where an assembly of Prussian and Spanish intellectuals debate everything from the direction of post-Bonaparte Europe and the rise of the novel to Kant and Goya. Yet something sinister is stirring in the village, a murderous harbinger of the dawning century. Neuman was singled out for praise by Roberto Bola o and it's easy to see why: like that late author, Neuman combines love and intrigue with serious intellectual engagement. A novel of ideas somewhere between Kafka's The Castle and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Neuman's English-language debut is a rich deconstruction of the competing currents of history, less a postmodernist pastiche than proof that modernism is still alive in the Spanish-speaking world.
