Obra Maestra (Masterpiece)
by Juan Tallon
Description
The story in this novel is utterly implausible – and yet it happened. One of the world’s leading museums, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, commissioned a piece from leading American sculptor Richard Serra to celebrate its inauguration in 1986. A sculpture weighing thirty-eight tons which one fine day… simply vanished into thin air. Nobody knew how it had disappeared, when it had happened, or who was responsible. A mixture of nonfiction novel and fictionalized reportage, combining the bizarre with the hallucinogenic, Masterpiece employs the pace of a thriller to reconstruct a case that poses some disturbing questions. How could something like this have happened? How does a copy become an original? What even is contemporary art? And what was the true fate of the famous, huge and immensely heavy steel sculpture that evaporated? Might it reappear one day?
“I am especially amazed by the generosity of this polyphony. More than a stylistic
audacity, I see it as proof of great sensitivity. The author speaks masterfully of contemporary
art, addressing the relationship between the original and the copy and the collective dimension of a work. It also inspires a keen awareness of history. Even more impressive, it offers a scathing vision of our present, and more particularly our political present. It is admirable to have succeeded in turning a work as rectangular as Equal-Parallel / Guernica-Bengasi into a prism that refracts the world so powerfully”.
Benjamin Burguete, editor at Le Bruit du Monde (France)
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Endorsements
“I am especially amazed by the generosity of this polyphony. More than a stylistic audacity, I see it as proof of great sensitivity. The author speaks masterfully of contemporary art, addressing the relationship between the original and the copy and the collective dimension of a work. It also inspires a keen awareness of history. Even more impressive, it offers a scathing vision of our present, and more particularly our political present. It is admirable to have succeeded in turning a work as rectangular as Equal-Parallel / Guernica-Bengasi into a prism that refracts the world so powerfully”.
Benjamin Burguete, editor at Le Bruit du Monde (France)
Reviews
“One of the most brilliant literary frescos of recent Spain, a modern bonfire of the vanities in which politics, the institution of art, and the judiciary reveal their baseness and their ineptitude… Tallón has written a ‘total’ novel. Funny, tragic, forceful”.
Carlos Pardo, Babelia
“Has all the ingredients to become one of the great reads of this year”.
Carolina Wernwe, Publishers Weekly en español
“Lives up to the promise of the title: a masterpiece. Specifically,
a masterpiece of factual literature in Spain”.
Miqui Otero, El Periódico
“The best: the perfect narrative combination of reportage and literary style… The result is intelligent and thought-provoking”.
Jesús Ferrer, La Razón
Author Biography
Juan Tallón (Vilardevós, Ourense, 1975) has a degree in philosophy from the University of Santiago de Compostela. He contributes to a number of newspapers and magazines – including El País, El Progreso and Jot Down – and regularly appears on the radio station Cadena SER. He is the author of several books in Galician, and in Spanish he has published both non-fiction – Libros peligrosos [Dangerous Books]
and Mientras haya bares [So Long as There Are Bars] – and the novels El váter de Onetti [Onetti’s Toilet], Fin de poema [End of the Poem], Salvaje Oeste [Wild West] and Rewind (published by Anagrama). “A striking literary performance... A living book” (Manuel Jabois, El País); “Excellent writing... An ode to broken things” (Juan Cruz, El País); “An eloquent and shocking book” (Pilar Castro, El Mundo).
Books From Spain
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View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Anagrama
- Publication Date February 2022
- Orginal LanguageSpanish
- ISBN/Identifier 9788433999412
- Publication Country or regionSpain
- FormatHardback
- Pages328
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Edition4th edition
- Copyright Year2022
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