Miquel de Palol

Premio Transfuge du meilleur roman hispanique 2015

Esta novela se estructura como una muñeca rusa de esas que contienen en su interior nuevas muñecas, que apenas se diferencian de la anterior en algunos detalles mínimos y, por supuesto, en su tamaño decreciente que desemboca en la última, diminuta, de ellas. El jardín de los siete crepúsculos es una sucesión de relatos que se encadenan y contienen otros relatos, a la manera de los anónimos autores que conformaron Las mil y una noches o Bocaccio en El Decamerón, cuya excusa narrativa, la confluencia en un refugio aislado de los males que devastan el mundo, la peste o una guerra atómica mundial, es un claro referente para Palol, que sitúa su narración en un futuro indefinido y la desarrolla en torno a la historia de una familia que controla financiera y políticamente, desde las sombras, los avatares mundiales.

"Hallucinatory, genre-hopping novel [...] An entertaining intellectual mystery." Kirkus Review

"“The Garden of Seven Twilights” is a vast, encyclopedic epic of apocalypse, global conspiracy and familial intrigue, told in nested stories like “The Decameron” and “The Canterbury Tales.” The New York Times

"A Sprawling, Encyclopedic Archeology of Cold War Thought (...) A monumental tour-de-force, The Garden of Seven Twilights is a long-overdue introduction to Palol for English-speaking audiences. One can only hope that it will be followed by more translations…” Matthew Eatough, Ancillary Review of Books

"This counts among the most important experiments in Spanish fiction in recent years. Palol’s novel follows in the footsteps of works by Borges, Calvino and Perec. What it brings to this end-of-century literature is an emphasis on pure pleasure derived from the dexterous use of language in the telling of the story." El Mundo

"This novel is the result of a titanic effort to bring the old and new together in a single whole that aspires to offer a complete picture of today’s world." ABC

"A passionate story that will grip the reader for the entire duration of its nearly 1,000 pages." El País

" Un événement éditorial." Transfuge

"Cette somme littéraire est à dévorer, puis à conserver précieusement pour témoigner, un jour, de tout ce qui fit rêver les humains." Le Monde des Livres

"More contemporary than Boccaccio it reflects, on one hand, a touch of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, without the Italian writer’s lightness and, on the other hand, a shade of Borges that calls to mind Pierre Ménard, Author of the Quixote." Alias, Il Manifiesto


"Palol, brilliantly following Bocaccio’s model(…) constructs a giant puzzle, alternating symbolic interpretations with astrological and cabalistic elements, excerpts of chronicles, mathematical calculations, unrequited love, mysterious legends, an autopsy, poetry, cryptic cinematic images, and mythological digressions all mixed together in a potentially infinite story." Il Giornale

"Since it’s origins, the novel has vacillated between the poles of restraint and capaciousness, the formal discipline of Flaubert or Jane Austen and the catch-all approaches of Sterne or Pynchon. Palol is a rarity in the landscape of present-day Catalan letters for his unswerving devotion to the latter approach." Words without borders

"“Il”, c’est-à-dire le grand roman européen, avec autant l’estomac (plus mille pages ici) que de cellules grises (histoire, philosophie, cosmologies, ésotériques: il brasse tout), le digne héritier des Broch, Mann, Musil. Miquel de Palol, c’est le cousin catalan et contemporain des fresquistes titanesques de l’Europe agonisante de l’entre-deux-guerres." Damien Aubel, Transfuge

"Un libro straordinario per gli amanti dei dilemmi logico-matematici, per i lettori di Borges, per tutti gli appassionati della più rarefatta e metafisica fantascienza." Maria Nicola, L'Indice