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René's Flesh

René's Flesh

by Virgilio Piñera, translated from the Spanish by Mark Schafer

$18.95
$18.95
Available as E-Book Latin American Literature
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“Piñera makes Stephen King look like Dr. Seuss.” —Alan Ryan

The celebrated Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera’s greatest novel, René’s Flesh, first published in 1956, opens in an unnamed city in an unspecified time with René, a young man about to turn twenty, standing in line outside a butcher shop where he has been sent by his father to buy some meat. Faced with a hanging side of beef, René recoils. In Spanish, carne can mean both meat and flesh, and throughout Piñera's pathbreaking novel of initiation, René is in a desperate flight from his carnal existence, as he moves through a world full of people who either want to mortify his flesh or use it for their pleasure. Will René succeed in outrunning the destiny his father has bequeathed to him? Only the man weighing the meat knows for sure.

Out of print for over two decades, Mark Schafer's masterful English translation has been carefully revised for this reissue.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896231332
Pages: 272
Publication Date:

Praise

A visionary and darkly sarcastic work where human flesh reaches its apotheosis and crucifixion. The force of the premise, the author's extreme and dramatic gestures, as well as certain psychological and formal discoveries, revealed an ambitious, incisive art, detached from routine compromises. This novel sometimes resorts to surrealist techniques, and at times, when pain is its subject matter, it achieves an astonishing intensity.
—Witold Gombrowicz

Piñera, a Cuban, fashions a world that is completely carnal—only sometimes erotic—where slaughterhouses are given names like those of banks ("The Equitable Butchers Shop''), where man himself is meat or flesh destined for the knife and where freedom is achieved only by the willing sacrifice of that flesh. The mercilessness of this moral vision is charged by quicksilver storytelling, passionate and boisterously savage.
—Publishers Weekly

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