• Private Life
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Archipelago Books

Private Life

Private Life

by Josep Maria de Sagarra, translated from the Catalan by Mary Ann Newman

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In 1932 Josep Maria de Sagarra set out to write the great Catalan novel, an urban antidote to the rural tales and timid novels of customs that prevailed in the Catalan literature of the time. Private Life is the result: a scathing critique of the decadent and disappearing aristocratic class of Catalonia. Private Life holds up a mirror to the moral corruption in the interstices of the Barcelona high society Sagarra was born into. Boudoirs of demimonde tramps, card games dilapidating the fortunes of milquetoast aristocrats—and how they scheme to conceal them—fading manors of selfish scions, and back rooms provided by social-climbing seamstresses are portrayed in vivid, sordid, and literary detail.

The novel, practically a roman-à-clef for its contemporaries, was a scandal in 1932. The 1960s edition was bowdlerized by Franco’s censors. Part Lampedusa, part Genet, this translation will bring an essential piece of 20th-century European literature to the English-speaking public.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9780914671268
Pages: 496
Publication Date:

Praise

A satirical, multigenerational saga about the intricate relationship between Barcelona's fading aristocracy and the city's sordid demimonde... Expect murder, revenge, and fallings in and out of love ... The novel comes most alive when the author digresses from his plot: in his characters' back stories, his ruminations on Spain's socioeconomics, his cleverly vicious bons mots and descriptions ... and in some surprisingly graphic sex... In this casual, colloquial translation, Barcelona between the wars is full of tawdry vitality, much like the novel itself.
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

[Private Life] is a portrait of the "great world" of Barcelona and its loyalties in the years that preceded the Republic and in the early days of the new regime. Rigorous contemporaneity, stylistic effectiveness, the structural tour de force...and its daring treatment of manners and mores, make this book a unique product in Sagarra's work as a whole.
—Marina Gusta, University of Barcelona

Determined to produce a raw and gritty representation of the fallen Barcelonan aristocracy, Sagarra wrote Private Life, a novel heavily censored in its time and just recently brought to English readers. Through Mary Ann Newman’s accessible translation, the vibrancy of Sagarra’s narrative speaks with nuance and clarity, enwrapping readers in the tantalizing downfall of the aristocratic Lloberola family.
—Briana McDonald, The Literary Review

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