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EL AMANTE URUGUAYO. Una historia real
Did Federico García Lorca’s lover Enrique Amorim steal his corpse? Did he disguise himself as Jean Paul Sartre to attend a secret meeting between Chaplin and Picasso? Did he sabotage Pablo Neruda’s efforts to win the Nobel Prize?
After monumental research into the Buenos Aires of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War and post war Paris, Santiago Roncagliolo reveals the private lives of the great geniuses of 20th Century art, their jealousies, rivalries and loves. He borrows the eyes of the chameleon-like Enrique Amorim: millionaire and communist, homosexual and married man, Uruguayan and Argentinian, he was capable of seducing the most brilliant minds of the century. With García Lorca he had a mysterious love, a love capable even of death.
The poet Garcia Lorca is an important cultural and historical Spanish figure and his life attracts continual interest from academics, historians and the me-dia. Lorca’s main biography and numerous studies of his life have been suc-cessfully published in English. Santiago Rocangliolo, who has already been published in translation in the UK, provides new insights into Lorca’s life that will surely interest UK readers.
“In 1933, Federico García Lorca arrived in Buenos Aires, invited by the Ar-gentine actress and theatre producer Lola Membrives, who was planning to stage several of his plays. As a poet and playwright, Lorca was well on his way to becoming a literary star. He had known a measure of fame in his na-tive Spain with the publication of Romancero gitano, and his play Blood Wedding had, as Roncagliolo puts it, “catapulted him to the cusp of celebrity”. Yet nothing had really prepared him for his Argentine – and later Uruguayan – tour. He was lionised by fellow writers, interviewed by the press, invited to soirees, introduced to the cream of society. The public filled theatres just to hear him read his poems. His head seems to have spun a little, and he certainly found it difficult to finish the following play that he had promised to Membrives, which eventually became Yerma. The producer decided to whisk him off to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, in order to favour the quiet conditions that might lead to Lorca’s actually sitting down and writing. As one might expect, his social life was even more hectic in Montevideo than in Buenos Aires, and Membrives’ plan backfired.” (From the reader report by Martin Schiffino)