HOTEL PARIS Vicent Andrés Estellés

Vicent Andrés Estellés was one of the finest poets working anywhere in Iberia during 20th C. His voice resonates with the blunt yet concentrated mastery of his fellow Valencian, the great Ausiàs March (1400-1459). His creative diction may also be explained by his unfailing censure of the totalitarian repression of General Franco's military dictatorship.

Vicent Andrés Estellés (1924-1993) was one of the finest poets working anywhere in Iberia during the last century. In lyrical terms, his voice resonates with the blunt yet concentrated mastery of his fellow Valencian, Ausiàs March (1400-1459), the patriach of the modern Catalan tradition. The desperate edge to his creative diction may also be explained, however, by his unfailing censure of the totalitarian repression of General Franco's dictatorship. Hotel Paris takes the microcosm of a meublé or bordello to expose the hardship of the life of ordinary people in the depth of the dictatorship. The account is especially sympathetic to the female condition. With their nation in defeat and their menfolk imprisoned or in exile, wives and mothers of Catalonia were obliged to toil at a variety of jobs including prostitution in order to put food on the table for their families. Hotel Paris is a painful but compelling collection and offers the reader creative commitment at its most basic yet inventive.

Autorentext

Vicent Andrés Estellés (1924-1993) was one of the finest poets writing in Iberia during the 20th C. His voice resonates with the mastery of his fellow Valencian, the great Ausiàs March (1400-1459). The desperate edge to his creative diction may also be explained by his unfailing censure of the totalitarian repression of General Franco's dictatorship.

Dominic Keown is a Life Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He specialises in contemporary Iberian culture. He has published widely on literature and cinema from Spain, particularly on the ideological interface between regressive centralism and peripheral national consciousness.

Antonio Cortijo-Rodgers studies at the Department of Mathematic and the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley where he specializes in formal logic. He is a member of the Center for Catalan Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara).

Inhalt

Contents - Acknowledgements - Introduction - Bibliography - Translation into English.