Chromos

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There is an affliction among novelists known as “second-book trouble,” which can mean anything from writer’s block following an initial success to failure to get a second book published. Felipe Alfau may have set a distance record for this event with Chromos, the Menippean satire1 you are about to read. The story of Chromos, which I reviewed for the Chicago Tribune in 1990, is as good as any of the many stories it contains and can perhaps help introduce the new reader of Alfau to one of the oddest Modernist writers of the twentieth century — actually, he was a proto-postmodernist, to use Ilan Stavans’s term2—and to what is probably his final work, here being reissued by Dalkey Archive Press (as of this writing, Alfau is ninety-six and living in a New York City retirement home).

During the 1920s Alfau, whose family had emigrated from Spain to the United States in 1916, when he was fourteen, wrote a brilliant novel called Locos: A Comedy of Gestures that took eight years to find a publisher but was reviewed ecstatically by the novelist Mary McCarthy in Nation when it was published in 1936 and in an afterword fifty-three years later when it was reissued by Dalkey. Chromos was finished in 1948 but remained in typescript for forty years until it was rescued from oblivion by Dalkey editor Steven Moore — presumably no relation to Don Pedro Guzman O’Moore Algoracid, the book’s fantastic presiding genius, who is described early in the action (or inaction) as “a slightly daffy Irish-Moorish Don Quixote with sinister overtones of Beelzebub and the only Irishman I ever heard speak English with an Andalusian brogue.”

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