Volume 35, Number 20 · December 22, 1988
Looking Back on 'Locos'
By Mary McCarthy
Fifty-two years ago, on June 27, 1936, I reviewed a book in The Nation. Very favorably. The author, Felipe Alfau, was said to be a young Spaniard writing in English. Spain was Republican then; the Franco revolt that turned into the Spanish Civil War began on July 19, three weeks and a day later. The charm exercised on me by Locos, therefore, cannot have been a matter of politics. And I was ignorant of Spain and Spanish. It was more like love. I was enamored of that book and never forgot it, though my memory of it, I now perceive on rereading, is somewhat distorted, as of an excited young love affair. Alfau, or his book, was evidently my fatal type, which I would meet again in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire and more than once in Italo Calvino. But Locos was the first. And it appears to have been the author's unique book, fittingly, as it were. I never heard of Alfau again, though for a time I used to ask about him whenever I met a Spaniard; not one knew his name. Maybe that was because he lived in the United States, if indeed he did.[1] But in this country I never found anyone besides me who had read Locos. Now the book is being reissued.[2] Launched more than fifty years ago by a Farrar and Rinehart club of so-called 'Discoverers,' it has been rediscovered, by what means I don't know.
Feature, 2156 words
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