Description

Pío Baroja

Translated by D. J. Walker

Night Flame

ISBN: 978-1-956921-08-3 (pbk., ebook available)

(September 2022) 

“I have always been a liberal radical, an individualist and an anarchist. In the first place, I am an enemy of the Church; in the second place, I am an enemy of the State. When these great powers are in conflict I am a partisan of the State as against the Church, but on the day of the State’s triumph, I shall become an enemy of the State.”

—Pío Baroja, 1917

“I deplore the fact that you have not yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.”

—Ernest Hemingway, 1956

It is one of the great omissions of literary history that Los amores tardíos, the last novel of Pío Baroja’s great trilogy, Agonías de nuestro tiempo, has had to wait almost a century before being translated into English. Baroja, famed novelist and activist of Spain’s Generation of ‘98, finished this work in 1926. It is a tale of doomed love set in the social and political turmoil of Europe between the wars, the lasting effects of which are felt in the lovers’ intimate conversations.

Baroja was born in San Sebastian in 1872 and travelled widely through Europe until his death in 1956. Trained as a doctor, he practiced only briefly, devoting his life to writing and, to a lesser extent, politics.