The Cardboard House

Martín Adán author Katherine Silver translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:New Directions Publishing Corporation

Published:28th Sep '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Cardboard House cover

Published in 1928 to great acclaim when its author was just twenty years old, The Cardboard House is sweeping, kaleidoscopic, and passionate. The novel presents a stunning series of flashes — scenes, moods, dreams, and weather— as the narrator wanders through Barranco (then an exclusive seaside resort outside Lima). In one beautiful, radical passage after another, he skips from reveries of first loves, South Pole explorations, and ocean tides, to precise and unashamed notations of class and of race: an Indian woman “with her hard,shiny, damp head of hair—a mud carving,” to a gringo gobbling “synthetic milk,canned meat, hard liquor.”

Adán’s own aristocratic family was in financial freefall at the time, and, as the translator notes, The Cardboard House is as “subversive now as when it was written: Adán’s uncompromising poetic vision and the trueness and poetry of his voice constitute a heroic act against cultural colonialism.”

"“Wonderfully youthful, poetically miraculous, The Cardboard House is the most representative — and the best — of the Latin American avant garde of the 1920s.”" -- César Aira
"“This book is profoundly realist, but it is not a reproduction of exterior reality;it is rather the poetic, sensorial, intuitive, non-rational testimony of this reality.”" -- Mario Vargas Llosa
"“I dreamt I was sixteen and Martín Adán was giving me piano lessons. The old man’s fingers, long as the Amazing Rubber Man’s, plunged through the floor and played a chain of underground volcanoes.”" -- Roberto Bolaño

  • Runner-up for Literary Award (Translation) 2013

ISBN: 9780811219594

Dimensions: 203mm x 135mm x 10mm

Weight: 166g

128 pages