Institut Ramon LLull

Dr. Morella, after nineteen years in academia, can barely cling to his image of himself as a Charmingly Anachronistic Literature Professor as he struggles to write an article and drowns in envy over his colleague’s successes. When his obstetrician wife, Sesé, delivers a horrifically deformed yet biologically viable baby—“its face a flesh dog’s dinner […] its head exploded like bone popcorn”—its birth calls into question their conceptual and aesthetic certainties.

This hilarious campus novel with no campus takes aim at the functioning [sic] of both humanities and scientific institutions. Bagunyà’s multi-faceted, supersaturated narration—with its monstrous barrage of footnotes, serial parenthetical clauses, digressions, knowing winks, sentences that end abruptly or trail off— challenges the reader’s perspective through a constant upending of their expectations, setting the novel of ideas on its ear.