The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia

by Max Besora, Mara Faye Lethem (Translator)

Overview

Joan Orpí (Piera, 1593 - New Barcelona, 1645) is one of the most unknown characters in Spanish history. In this torrential book we are told the odyssey that brought him first to Barcelona, later to Sevilla and finally to America, where he would experience all kinds of outlandish situations.

Using historical facts as raw material, and with stellar appearances of characters such as Miguel de Cervantes or the brigand Serrallonga among others, Besora converses with the satirical tradition of works such as Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gulliver's Travels or Don Quixote, to paint a fresco of Catalonia in the seventeenth century and the Golden Age of the Spanish empire, creating a novel, fresh, sharp and bursting with exuberant adventures.

A triumphant, playful masterpiece brought into a unique style of English thanks to the triumphant creativity of translator Mara Faye Lethem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948830249
Publisher:	Open Letter
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Max Besora started his career as a poet, and has since gone on to publish three novels, including Volcano and The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpi, Conquistador and Founder of Catalonia, which received the 2018 City of Barcelona Prize for Catalan Literature. He also plays trumpet in a jazz band and is currently co-writing a non-fiction book about rap music.

Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by Jaume Cabré, David Trueba, Albert Sánchez Piñol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron, Marc Pastor and Toni Sala, among others, and shorter fiction by such authors as Juan Marsé, Rodrigo Fresán, Pola Oloixarac, Teresa Colom, and Alba Dedeu. Her translation of The Whispering City by Sara Moliner recently received an English PEN Award and two of her translations were nominated for the 2016 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Read an Excerpt

BOOK ONE

IN WHICH IS NARRATED, WITH GREAT GUSTO AND AN EYE ON POSTERITY, ORPÍ’S INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD, FIRST IN THE TOWN OF PIERA AND ANON DURING HIS STUDIES IN THE CITY OF BARCELONA, WHERE HE HAD VARIED EXPERIENCES, AS MANY GOOD AS BAD, WHICH TAUGHT HIM THAT LIFE IS NO BED OF ROSES BUT RATHER A LONG ORDEAL WHERE ONE LEARNS FROM HARD KNOCKS, AND AS SUCH AND BEFITTING HIS STORY SHALL BE EXPLAINED PERHAPS NOT EXACTLY AS IT TRULY HAPPENED BUT AT LEAST QUITE SIMILARLY.

CHAPTER I

Thus begins the story of Joan Orpí, indubitably some sort of premonition of his later life of adventures

It is said that while Joan Orpí’s birth was a bit strange, it was indeed highly spectacular. And if you don’t believe me, listen to this: It all began in the small Catalan town of Piera, one evening of the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ MDXCIII (if I’ve got my Roman numerals right), when an old, ailing pigeon, wet from the falling rain, flying hither and thither from clouds filled with electrical activity, soared through the trees and sown fields, made three shaky circles around the church bell tower, and floated through the heavens of smoking chimneys in a prodigious final flight, until its wings could take it no further and. Finally, amid hoarse glook-glooks, it landed clumsily on the angular sill of a window where, agonizing in horrific pain, it consumed its last moments of life in absolute sepulchral silence.

That window belonged to the home of the Orpís, a family of respectable wealth and notable local pedigree, and inside the room the light given off by three candles revealed spread-eagle legs covered in varicose veins and hair, trembling from the effort of bringing a new soul into the world. Mrs. Orpí was about to birth an infant in such a way that would become legend, and fodder for numerious sessions of rumormongering in the town of Piera (at least on one Sunday afternoon).

"Push . . . ! For the love o’God, Eulàlia, push . . . !” shouted old Orpí.

“This child be driven by the devil, my beloved . . . !” she bellowed, the birth being such great torment that she couldn’t help dire prognosticating.

The woman had flooded the bed with excrement, blood, and other fluids, and was straining her nether regions to get the baby out of her womb once and for all. So loud did she bellow that it seemed the sky would crack and splinter into a thousand shards. Alerted by the hollering, a throng of curious neighbors had gathered outside the house and were pointing their fingers at the window of the Orpís’ home.

“My booty is set to essplode!” she shrieked, her eyes rolling back in her head. “Ay, God’s loaves . . . I’m dying hither!”

“Come now, woman, don’t scream so, thy serenade of hurtling and shouting shall bringeth all Piera here!”

“Sssh! Quit thy rubbish talk, Pepet,” ordered the woman. “This birth art an executioner come to take me!”

“Peace be quiet, woman, prithee, any moment now he’ll be out in the worlde, a perfect right genius . . . wid a moustache andall!”

“And who woulde have thou believe my baby art a boychild, big lump?” asked the woman, pushing.

“Come now, woman . . . caint ye see we needs an heir to tend these lands?”

“Always with your mind on coin, yah leech! Whilst here I beest dying of excruciating pain! My wish is a girl and she shall be called Maria . . . hither, thither, and yon!”

“Over my dead bodikins! Firstmost a male heir . . . it’s the least thou canst do!” ordered her husband. “And we shall name him Joan, as my father (who art in heaven), whether thou liketh it or not! I’ll respect thine pain, at least respect mine legacy!”

“If that be true, then thou oughten warn all those whores of yours since, out of respect, thou should lyest only withe your wife!”

“Darent ye commence that ole song & dance, Eulàlia!” bellowed her husband, feigning indignation. “Let us get this birth over withe . . . or I’m like to faint!”

“Oh, yea, sure, when I rayse the subject of the bawds ye frequent in Barcelona, out comes the broom and, flish-flash-flish-flash, thou changeth up the subject right quick . . . ya swine!”

“Eulàlia, cry thee mercy . . . ” said her husband, kneeling by the bed. “Quit gabbering and push . . . for the love of all that be holy!”

Just then, at the eleventh-hour, the town midwife rushes in. She was in such a rush that she came wearing just her nightgown and slippers. “Let us see if we caint get this here show upon the road, milady!” she barked with a macaronic howl as Eulàlia’s husband crossed himself. But despite the best efforts of that expert in births natural and unnatural, it didn’t seem the child would be born that night, nor that the storm had any desire to wane; quite the contrary, the sky spat out its fury harder than ever, with clouds colliding violently and creating brutal electric rays that fell upon the earth, cleaving mountains, burning forests and splitting trees in two. So great was the storm that one of those bolts of lightning fell right atop the Orpí home, hid in the chimney, snaked down like a bulimic cosmic worm and burst through the fireplace into the living room, where it hit a dog in the snout. The electrical charge set his pure canine instinct into motion, and it bit one of the servants who was stretched out on a straw bed; the young man leapt up from the pain and banged into a shelf above him, and from the shelf fell a pot containing two thousand Catalan reals, ten gold maravedis, thirty billion castellanos, forty of Barbarossa’s pfennigs, eight liards, five hundred deniers, five croats, two-hundred pounds, eleven 1/3 trentíns, and a bunch of counterfeit money (that was plentiful throughout the country in that period), of which one coin went flying and, tracing a perfect semicircle, landed in the mouth of the woman giving birth. A curious detail: throughout this entire chain of circumstances, the lightning’s electrons had transferred from one object to the next when they touched, and the coin the woman swallowed sent an electric charge through her whole body, helping her with the final push needed for her to expel— with a shy “oh!”— the newborn from the maternal cave while the coin emerged from her back end slot in a wholly ultranatural way.

Plof.

Thus was born Joan Orpí del Pou.

Editorial Reviews

If Cervantes and the Monty Python guys were shoved into the Large Hadron Collider—and Earth didn’t explode—we might get something like Joan Orpí. How lucky are we to be alive! And to have Max Besora!”—Ryan Chapman, author of Riots I Have Known

“Orpí’s escapades involve witches and brigands, scheming aristocrats and rebellious slaves, another man’s unfaithful wife and the liberated bride of a colonial grandee, even “a giant squid of colossal proportions.” He makes friends with a depressed knight who abhors violence and conspires with a prisoner whose tattoos are purported to reveal an escape route. And it all makes a weirdly riotous kind of sense. As the captain has explained at the outset, although he heard Orpí’s tale from a man who was “four sheets to the wind. Nonetheless, I didst believe him.”—New York Times Book Review

“Dark humor, history, fiction, and misadventures collide in Spanish writer Besora’s wildly imaginative and irreverent English-language debut. . . . Drama, unbelievable escapades, copious footnotes, and comedy blend together seamlessly, and they make Orpí’s life one of the most remarkable in contemporary literature.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Joan Orpí mixes tomfoolery and satire, lampooning so many sacred cows, including empire, history, religion, and literature. Besora’s prose is the real star, merging language of yore with modern day slang. Boisterous, bright, freewheeling, and playful, The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia, put simply, is a shit-tonne of fun.”—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books

“Flagrant, shameless, high-voltage, and sometimes just consummately silly. I can’t think of another translator who could have pulled this off, but like any great writer who feels they have total license to do whatever the hell they want with their language, Lethem creates what the narrator describes as ‘a language that constitutes the topography of its own world’, not striving for an accurate period reconstruction, but an archaism that’s invented, anachronistic, bastardised, defiantly inconsistent and totally, gloriously fun.”—Daniel Hahn

“Like Don Quixote, this is a chivalric novel, seasoned with the humor of an author with wit in spades. Besora grew up with the toxic style of the great US underground cartoonists, the ‘Weirdo’ gang, and you can tell.”—Time Out

“An heir to Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne and Swift, Besora has conceived his novel as a giant neo-baroque container with room for everything and more besides. The combination of events, registers, genres and characters is manic in its variety.”—Pere Antoni Pons, Ara

“This novel is here to atone for a glaring oversight in the history of Catalan literature, reviving a tradition that has seemed all but dead since the time of Tirant lo Blanc, since any language deserves, at the very least, two great satirical novels; and this one is so Catalan it hurts.”—Montserrat Serra, Vila Web

From the Publisher

★ 2021-03-03
A rollicking, Rabelaisian tale by Catalan poet and novelist Besora.

Joan Orpí, writes an invented scholar in an inventive foreword, was “a Catalan man who went through a lot and managed to come through it all.” In language that would not be out of place on Talk Like a Pirate Day, Besora relates Orpí’s imagined adventures, a narrative framed by a crew of miscreant sailors being told what pass for maritime nursery tales by a captain desperate to put an end to their grousing. “Ye shant find these in any book of history,” the captain declares, “yet they be no less memorable or less important.” True enough. First there’s Orpí’s miraculous birth, helped along by a blast of lightning directed by the Virgin of Montserrat, who instructs him, “Hush thy blathering piehole and heed these instrucktions on how to effect your fate.” Alas, Orpí’s not much of a listener, and he bumbles between poles of behavior—a would-be monk one moment, a Lothario the next, unconcerned with language at one turn and adept at “mumbling unbearable Latinisms” at another. Law degree acquired but his services not exactly in high demand, Orpí bumbles further, meeting the likes of Cervantes, Sir Francis Drake, and Estebanico the Moor, companion of Cabeza de Vaca, as he eventually maneuvers his way into a position of power as the caudillo of New Catalonia, a hellhole-turned–anarchic outpost in the jungles of South America. Oh, and then there’s his ineffective courtship of a “damsel with an extremely long name,” which ends in nothing but tears. Think of it as a Catalonian rejoinder to Little Big Man, and go with the onrushing flow. Orpí’s a schlemiel, but he’s an endearing one, and we cheer for him. For his part, Besora delivers a delightful parody of the conquistadors’ reports of old, peppered with all manner of goofiness, from songs with lyrics such as “For we art the hardy foes / of abstemia & anemia” to a pseudo-Renaissance vocabulary that will make a language lover smile.

Utterly improbable—and utterly delightful.

Kirkus Reviews