Institut Ramon LLull

Mateu is a middle-aged painter whom success has eluded. An exhibition leads to a job offer illustrating articles by an enigmatic writer named Crisòstom, who may be an undiscovered genius, or perhaps merely a plagiarist. Mateu’s pursuit of Crisòstom and his work will lead him down to strange, spiraling paths, and to an island surrounded by black ink that houses archives of Absurd Accidents, Massacres and Genocides, and a Slush Pile of failed writing. Along the way, he meets a patron who is writing a Worldwide Dictionary of Unrecognized Genius.

What place do painting and literature have in the 21st century? For whom is art created? Does it have the power to save an artist’s soul or to destroy it? Is obscurity a gift, success a curse? In an adroit way, Baixauli— one of the finest prosaists on Catalan literature—leads us into a morass of eight-hundred-page novels, trick mirrors, creators and curators in midlife and beyond, grappling with big questions in this fragmented, non-linear narrative that reads like a quiet mystery.