Chromos

by Felipe Alfau

Book Overview

A controversial finalist for the National Book Award in 1990, Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, Chromos... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679734430
• ISBN13: 9780679734437
• Release Date: July 1991
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Chromos

David M.Ms Lachmayr CHROMOS; By Felip Alfau, Dalkey Press [(348 pages)(ISBN 0-916583 52-X)] The story is about a group of Spanish émigrés, Don Pedreo, the writer Garcia and the Felipe Alfau himself and others in New York City. This group travel in time and space in and around New York City eating drinking and talking in an existentialist mode--their free will being exercised in this meaningless world as we watch. This sets the stage; that all these persons in the novel are more than what they seem; their history goes back in time and forward again, giving the reader that extra level of understanding and enchanted confusion of the action/reaction of these characters. Alfau bring the reader along with these émigrés and we become a part of this great adventure, albeit as an accidental tourist with Alfau being the tour guide. The novel always keeps changing and folding back on itself then goes forward to others places and times around the City and the world. Alfau drops names, names of painters, scientist, composers, philosophers and on and on not as name dropping per se, but rather to give a flavor of time and history that relates to how we dream--things always coming and going and seeming real, at least what we think is real. Alfau also expects us to know his/our history and art and knowing the meaning behind the art. It is his way of giving a "signpost" of information to the sweep of this work. He changes our view of each character so the reader is never safe in comfortable harbor of knowledge of where those characters are in time and space within the context of history which the novel exist in. One may try to set the novel down and stop reading it, but why would one ever consider it? And to try to explain this work would be like trying to teach someone how to ride a two-wheeled bicycle by way of messages sent in a bottle over the ocean. CHROMOS is one of those books when you finish; you re-read it to see what was missed, again and again, stopping once the meaningless universe ends.

Chromos

David M.Ms Lachmayr CHROMOS; By Felip Alfau, Dalkey Press [(348 pages)(ISBN 0-916583 52-X)] The story is about a group of Spanish émigrés, Don Pedreo, the writer Garcia and the Felipe Alfau himself and others in New York City. This group travel in time and space in and around New York City eating drinking and talking in an existentialist mode--their free will being exercised in this meaningless world as we watch. This sets the stag; that all these persons in the novel are more than what they seem; their history goes back in time and forward again, giving the reader that extra level of understanding and enchanted confusion of the action/reaction of these characters. Alfau bring the reader along with these émigrés and we become a part of this great adventure, albeit as an accidental tourist with Alfau being the tour guide. The novel always keeps changing and folding back on itself then goes forward to others places and times around the City and the world. Alfau drops names, names of painters, scientist, composers, philosophers and on and on not as name dropping per se, but rather to give a flavor of time and history that relates to how we dream--things always coming and going and seeming real, at least what we think is real. Alfau also expects us to know his/our history and art and knowing the meaning behind the art. It is his way of giving a "signpost" of information to the sweep of this work. He changes our view of each character so the reader is never safe in comfortable harbor of knowledge of where those characters are in time and space within the context of history which the novel exist in. One may try to set the novel down and stop reading it, but why would one ever consider it? And to try to explain this work would be like trying to teach someone how to ride a two-wheeled bicycle by way of messages sent in a bottle over the ocean. CHROMOS is one of those books when you finish; you re-read it to see what was missed, again and again, stopping once the meaningless universe ends.

A Little-Known Postmodern Classic

There are so many interesting things to say about Felipe Alfau and his novel, "Chromos," that it is difficult to decide where to begin. There is the novel itself, of course, a complex and sometimes difficult post-modernist narrative written years before the appearance of the so-called post-modernists (Alfau was, in other words, ahead of his time). There is the history of the novel's publication, a fascinating tale in its own right. There is the fact that Alfau, a Spaniard who came to the United States at the age of fourteen, wrote "Chromos" and his earlier novel, "Locos," in English, rather than his native Spanish. And there is, finally, the biography and the views of the author himself-the former enigmatic, almost mysterious, in its obscurity; the latter disturbingly reactionary, reminiscent of Ezra Pound and forcing the reader to separate the man from his work."Chromos" is a series of narratives within narratives of a coterie of Spanish immigrants living in New York City sometime between the two World Wars. Among the main characters is Don Pedro Guzman O'Moor Algoracid, also known as Peter Guz and the Moor, and his close friend, Dr. Jose de los Rios, whom the Moor calls Dr. Jesuscristo. It is the Moor who first tells the novel's unidentified first person narrator to write the story of Spaniards living in New York, of the "Americaniards" as he calls them:"You should write a book about the Americaniards, somebody should-but you have not written for a long time-anyway you could not write any more about your people in Spain-have been too long away, forgotten too much-don't know what it's all about and you could not write about Americans-don't know enough-impossible ever to understand another people. I could not understand them when I first came and every day I understand them less. We meet, we talk, but neither knows what it's all about-total confusion. My English was abominable when I arrived and everyday I speak it worse-impossible; can't understand a damn thing."It is this request that frames the narrative, the Moor mysteriously taking the reluctant narrator to an old, dark, cockroach-infested basement apartment devoid of furniture (except for a book-filled bookcase), its walls covered by chromos-chromolithographs-"depicting people and scenes that came to life, but more like things remembered or imagined."From this place, the unidentified narrator of "Chromos" relates his close relationship with the writer Garcia. It is Garcia who provides two narratives within the larger framing story, reading aloud to the narrator from two different works-one the seemingly "corny" and salacious multi-generational saga of the rise and decline of the Sandoval family in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain, the other the cinematic narrative of a Spaniard named Ramos who, in a Mephistophelian bargain, is given the ability to skip through time and emigrates to America in the early twentieth century. All the time, while Garcia narrates the st

A fun exhilirating series of narratives--not hard at all!!!

I'll post a longer review of this work when I have time here. I once wrote a glowing book review about this book 10 years ago. This is one of these rare finds by Dalkey Archive press, which (admittedly) publishes esoteric and hard-to-read fiction. Out of nowhere, it was nominated for the National Book Award in 1990 or so, propelling this old man to some fame and notoriety. I remember Proust's metaphor in one of his books about one's literary works existing as separate creatures from the author, like little girls dancing around the death bed of a dying author. I think Alfau was interviewed as saying something like, I wrote this book decades ago. Why all of a sudden this attention? I used to give this book as the answer to the question of "what is your favorite book" because no one has ever heard of it (though I imagine university readers at the writing program where I taught, Johns Hopkins, would be sympathetic to this writing). Actually, although parts of it are long-winded, in general the narrative is conventional and full of old-fashioned storytelling. The characters engage in multiple philosophical conversations about time,reality and a lot of other things. I would compare this to Dostoevksy (in terms of the philosophical plane it travels on, not the plot, which is rather lackadaisical). Although there certainly is a tinge of European postmodern fiction here, unlike the fiction of Barth, there are not narrative tricks that distract from the story at hand. The end kind of wanders, but how fun it was getting there. You read for the set pieces, not for the overall plot. For variety, check out his short stories in Locos: A Comedy of Gestures. They are priceless gems. You have to be in the right frame of mind for philosophical digressions and plot that advances mainly through conversation, but if you are, you won't find it difficult to get into this book at all.To be honest, I've never met another person who has actually read this book, and it would be interesting to read responses from others who have read this book.I should point out that I am writing these impressions about 10 years after reading the book. I remember almost nothing, and yet I remember how I felt reading it and the impressions it left on me. Does this count as a legitimate review? It will be fun knowing that the book is there waiting to be picked up again.