Bellas artes
Luis Sagasti

FICTION | 2013 | 112 pages

What do the Little Prince, the Brazilian pastor who disappeared in the skies and was dragged away by an infinite number of helium balloons, Habermas’s dark youth, the painter Joseph Beuys, the saxophone player John Gilmore, and Slaughterhouse-Five protagonist Bill Pilgrim have in common? In a story that is at once fantastical and extracted from history, Luis Sagasti seduces us with the charm of a beautiful and intelligent conversation. A true work of art when it comes to taking a detour from history.

How does the world work? Who pulls its strings? Some people say everything is a great conspiracy: man never went to the moon, Paul McCartney died in 1967 and was replaced by someone identical, Jesus came down from the cross and had twins with Mary Magdalene, Shakespeare is Francis Bacon, and so on. You shouldn’t believe these things, but you should believe in secrets, this book warns us.

For thousands of years, the yarn has been spun and the threads have crossed over each other in infinite layers. So, where do we begin if we can’t find the end? Luis Sagasti pulls on one of the threads on the surface and cuts it abruptly, and from there he creates a marvelous constellation of characters—among them, Beuys, Vonnegut, Saint-Exúpery, Habermas, Wittgenstein, Glenn Miller, even the Brazilian pastor who tied himself to a chair with helium balloons—threading the most interesting and important facts about their lives together with a fine needle.

An extraordinary book that pays homage to the art of telling a story. An incredible and unclassifiable work that appears to tell thousands of stories, like a good wine, all at once and in one instant, like a haiku.

RIGHTS: spanish ETERNA CADENCIA | english CHARCO PRESS

BY LUIS SAGASTI:

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