Avalovara
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: First American Edition
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
Condition remarks: Light foxing on block but does not extent onto pages or text. Pages crisp.
A landmark of Brazilian experimental fiction, Avalovar is a dazzlingly intricate novel that chronicles the intertwined lives of several women — most centrally a mysterious, luminous figure known simply as the Woman Made of Words — through a rigorous and hypnotic structural conceit. Osman Lins constructs the narrative around a Latin palindrome inscribed in a magic square, with each letter of the square governing a chapter, and a spiral that determines the order in which those chapters unfold, creating a reading experience that is simultaneously mathematical and deeply sensual. The prose moves between Renaissance Europe, twentieth-century Brazil, and a timeless mythological space, weaving together themes of language, desire, creation, and the sacred nature of the feminine. Lins argues, through the very architecture of the text, that form and meaning are inseparable — that the shape of a story is itself a kind of truth. Cerebral yet passionately lyrical, Avalovar stands as one of the most ambitious and rewarding works of Latin American modernism, demanding and richly repaying the reader's full attention.
Author: Osman Lins (Translation by Gregory Rabassa)
Format: Hardback
Published: 1980, Alfred A. Knopf
Edition: First American Edition
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
Condition remarks: Light foxing on block but does not extent onto pages or text. Pages crisp.
A landmark of Brazilian experimental fiction, Avalovar is a dazzlingly intricate novel that chronicles the intertwined lives of several women — most centrally a mysterious, luminous figure known simply as the Woman Made of Words — through a rigorous and hypnotic structural conceit. Osman Lins constructs the narrative around a Latin palindrome inscribed in a magic square, with each letter of the square governing a chapter, and a spiral that determines the order in which those chapters unfold, creating a reading experience that is simultaneously mathematical and deeply sensual. The prose moves between Renaissance Europe, twentieth-century Brazil, and a timeless mythological space, weaving together themes of language, desire, creation, and the sacred nature of the feminine. Lins argues, through the very architecture of the text, that form and meaning are inseparable — that the shape of a story is itself a kind of truth. Cerebral yet passionately lyrical, Avalovar stands as one of the most ambitious and rewarding works of Latin American modernism, demanding and richly repaying the reader's full attention.