SPAIN AUTHOR · ROMANCE · SPANISH FICTION
Gonzalo Torrente Ballester
Also known as: G. Torrente Ballester, Torrente Ballester
DU CROISY. Seigneur La Grange... LA GRANGE. Yes? DU CROISY. A word with you; if you can speak without laughing.
— from Don Juan, 1978
Most acclaimed
Don Juan
1978
"In Don Juan, Peter Handke offers his unique take on history's best-known lover. Don Juan's story - "his own version"--Is filtered through the consciousness of an anonymous narrator, a failed innkeeper and chef, into whose solitude Don Juan bursts one day. On each day of the week that follows, Don Juan describes the adventures he experienced on that same day a week earlier. The adventures are erotic, but Handke's Don Juan is more pursued than pursuer. What makes his accounts riveting are the remarkable evocations of places and people, and the nature of his narration. This is, above all, a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space." "In this brief and wry volume, Peter Handke conjures images and depicts the subtleties of human interaction with an unforgettable vividness. Along the way, he offers a sharp commentary on many features of contemporary life."--Jacket.
Off-side
2001
When Danny Harte finds out there's been an anonymous foreign buy-out of his favourite club, City, he's furious - the fans were about to buy it themselves. The club is being secretive and Danny is determined to find out what's going on - until he's caught staking out the club by the police and cautioned. His parents are furious, and his friends too. No one is talking to him. But when Danny discovers Adam, a kid from Ghana, dumped by his agent who'd promised him a place as a junior at City, and lost in a foreign country he knows nothing about, Danny realizes there are worse ways of being alone. He decides to take Adam's story to the press - with terrifying consequences for them both . . .
Obra completa
1996
Don Juan (Spanish: [doŋ ˈxwan]), also known as Don Giovanni (Italian), is a legendary fictional Spanish libertine who devotes his life to seducing women. The original version of the story of Don Juan appears in the 1630 play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina. The play includes most of the elements found and later adapted in subsequent works, including the setting (Seville), the characters (Don Juan, his servant, his love interest, and her father, whom he kills), moralistic themes (honor, violence and seduction, vice and retribution), and the dramatic ending in which Don Juan dines with and is then dragged down to hell by the stone statue of the father he had previously slain. Tirso de Molina's play was subsequently adapted into numerous plays and poems, of which the most famous include a 1665 play, Dom Juan, by Molière; a 1787 opera, Don Giovanni, with music by Mozart and a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte largely adapting Tirso de Molina's play; a satirical and epic poem, Don Juan, by Lord Byron; and Don Juan Tenorio, a romantic play by José Zorrilla. By linguistic extension, from the name of the character, "Don Juan" has become a generic expression for a womanizer, and stemming from this, Don Juanism is a non-clinical psychiatric descriptor.