Tyrant Banderas Author:Ramon del Valle-Inclan, Alberto Manguel The first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the — avowed inspiration for García Márquez?s The Autumn of the — Patriarch and Roa Bastos?s I, the Supreme, Tyrant Banderas — is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American — Republic in the grip of a monster. Valle-Inclán, one of the — masters of Spanish modernism, combines... more » the splintered points
of view of a cubist painting with the campy excesses of 19thcentury
serial fiction to paint an astonishing picture of a ruthless
tyrant facing armed revolt.
It is the Day of the Dead, and revolution has broken out, creating
mayhem from Baby Roach?s Cathouse to the Harris Circus
to the deep jungle of Tico Maipú. The tyrant steps forth,
assuring all that he is in favor of freedom of assembly and
democratic opposition. Meanwhile, his secret police lock up,
torture, and execute students and Indian peasants in a sinister
castle by the sea where even the sharks have tired of a diet of
revolutionary flesh. Then the opposition strikes back. They
besiege the dictator?s citadel, hoping to bring justice to a downtrodden,
starving populace.
Peter Bush?s new translation of Valle-Inclán?s seminal novel,
the first into English since 1929, reveals a writer whose tragic
sense of humor is as memorably grotesque and disturbing as