Institut Ramon LLull

The White Plague

L'Altra Editorial, 2020
144 pages
Non Fiction

La plaga blanca

The White Plague

Ada Klein Fortuny

"An essay on six authors who faced the death sentence that was tuberculosis in the early 20th century. An audacious and delicate panegyric to literature."

The voice of Ada Klein Fortuny is one of this season’s discoveries. Behind this pseudonym hides a doctor, but also a writer, and those two facets converge in this investigation of how tuberculosis affected the life and work of six writers in the early 20th century. That disease was a true plague that inflicted a very unpleasant death, and the six authors she chooses are very different, but all renowned. Franz Kafka, for example, and George Orwell. Klein Fortuny shuns a reverential tone, instead using a simple style that draws readers in and stimulates them with riveting information, and moves them with intimate scenes. She persuades us that Paul Éluard was selfish, she reveals the secret love that—she’s convinced—consumed Joan Salvat-Papasseit, and she makes us admire the tenacity of Katherine Mansfield… These portraits are drawn with biographical information, testimonies pulled from correspondence, and recreations of scenes in sanitoriums, among others. More than a book about a disease, this is a tribute to life and to literature.

FOREIGN RIGHTS CONTACT

Txell Torrent
MB Agència Literària
txell@mbagencialiteraria.es
www.mbagencialiteraria.es


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