The Scale of Maps

by Belén Gopegui, Mark Schafer (Translator)

Overview

Sergio Prim is a staid, middle-aged geographer. The romantic advances of Brezo Varela, a lively young woman who shares his profession, induce a series of terrifying hallucinations from which he attempts to seek refuge by immersing himself in the quest to map a place in which love never results in disillusionment. A lyrical examination of language, imagination and desire.

Belén Gopegui burst onto the Spanish literary scene in 1993, bowling over critics with her masterful debut La escala de los mapas (The Scale of Maps), which was hailed as a masterpiece. This is her first work translated into English.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872865105
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	01/04/2011
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	7.02(w) x 10.80(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Belén Gopegui was born in Madrid in October 1963. In 1993, she burst onto the Spanish literary scene with her first novel, La escala de los mapas [The Scale of Maps]. Her masterful debut bowled over critics, winning both the Tigre Juan Prize and the “Santiago del Nuevo Extremo” Iberoamerican Prize for First Novel. Since then, Gopegui has published six more novels, and her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Turkish, Serbian, Finnish and Dutch.

Mark Schafer is a literary translator and visual artist who lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts and teaches Spanish and Translation at the Universityof Massachusetts Boston. Schafer has translated novels, short stories, essays and poetry by other Latin American authors including Gloria Gervitz, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Jesús Gardea, Eduardo Galeano and Antonio José Ponte. Schafer has received numerous grants and awards for his translations, including the Robert Fitzgerald Prize and two Translation Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Schafer edited and translated the anthology Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poetry of David Huerta, which was published in January 2009 by Copper Canyon Press.

Editorial Reviews

A geographer falls irredeemably in love with a flighty mapmaker in this graceful, peculiar Spanish tale. Sergio Prim, at 39 a self-described "small man" set in his bachelor ways, has begun an affair with a woman nine years his junior, Brezo Varela, whose vitality and passion for Sergio astonish him and wreak havoc on his orderly life. Being loved so fiercely by Brezo has disoriented him, and the narrative moves between the third and first person, depending on Sergio's increasingly unstable state. His instinct is to slip away and find his "hollow," a sanctuary safe from intrusion, "unencumbered by worry and marked by an intimate and benign invisibility." He takes off, ostensibly to do research in the mountains of Cuenca, and is haunted by thoughts of Brezo, even seeking the advice of a psychologist, while Brezo, wary of his absence, takes up with a Basque jai alai player. Gopegui's work is beautifully composed and elegantly translated, though Sergio's fundamental elusiveness leaves the reader empty-handed and lovelorn, which, depending on the reader, will be a disappointment or a stroke of brilliance. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"It's an ambitious novel, to be sure, made beautiful by Gopegui's liquid prose, and made accessible by her ultimate refusal to answer her own questions." --(Janet Potter)

Bookslut

"Map scales are about relationships. So is "The Scale of Maps," a poignant, provocative, profound and passionate book by respected Spanish writer Belén Gopegui."

The Kansas City Star