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René's Flesh

René's Flesh

by Virgilio Piñera, translated from the Spanish by Mark Schafer

$18.95
$18.95
Available as E-Book Latin American Literature
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“Piñera makes Stephen King look like Dr. Seuss.”  —Alan Ryan

The celebrated Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera’s greatest novel, René’s Flesh, first published in 1956, opens in an unnamed city in an unspecified time with René, a gay man just turned twenty, standing in line outside a butcher shop where he has been sent by his father to buy some meat. A hanging side of beef confronts him, and faced with it, Rene recoils. In Spanish, carne can mean both meat and flesh, and throughout Piñero's pathbreaking novel of initiation René is in desperate and unavailing flight from his fleshly existence as he moves thorugh a world full of people who want him and people who want to do him harm. And who, finally, can tell the difference? Certainly not René.

Out of print in for over 25 years, Mark Schafer's masterly English translation has been carefully revised for this reissue.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896231332
Pages: 272
Publication Date:

Praise

A visionary and darkly sarcastic work where human flesh reaches its apotheosis and crucifixion. The force of the premise, the author's extreme and dramatic gestures, as well as certain psychological and formal discoveries, revealed an ambitious, incisive art, detached from routine compromises. This novel sometimes resorts to surrealist techniques, and at times, when pain is its subject matter, it achieves an astonishing intensity.
—Witold Gombrowicz

Piñera, a Cuban, fashions a world that is completely carnal—only sometimes erotic—where slaughterhouses are given names like those of banks ("The Equitable Butchers Shop''), where man himself is meat or flesh destined for the knife and where freedom is achieved only by the willing sacrifice of that flesh. The mercilessness of this moral vision is charged by quicksilver storytelling, passionate and boisterously savage.
—Publishers Weekly

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