Sign-In
Cart
A Pleasure to Have Known You...
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
Publisher: Humberto (Tito) Lugo Vicente
Pages: 436
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.97 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
In the Republic of Postponements, the official coat of arms shows a pelican perched atop a scale whose pans are perpetually empty. The national motto, in macaronic Latin, promises: Tomorrow Without Fail.
Baltasar Valdivieso Quinones, a seventy-year-old retired doctor, finds one morning in his mailbox an official letter containing a single line: A Pleasure to Have Known You. No one knew him. No one had read anything he had submitted. No one, at any verifiable moment, had been in contact with him.
What follows is the story of what he witnessed while awaiting a response that never came.
A swamp guardian who lives in the swamp he protects. A secretary of development who organizes weddings. A plastic baby that speaks at legislative hearings. An electric company that inherited the ruins and billed for not repairing them. A justice system that archives whatever is inconvenient, starting at the letter N, in an order no one can now explain. An invisible river running beneath the capital's streets, always feeding the same gardens.
An iguana who watches everything from the ceiling and who, in three years, spoke exactly twice.
A Pleasure to Have Known You is a political satire built with the tools of magical realism: the comedy of bureaucratic absurdity, the clinical precision of the witness who does not look away, and the question no official communiqué answers: what happens when a system is so perfectly designed not to work that it works perfectly?
Also from
Travoladis
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1967-1972 (Loa #158): When She Was Good / Portnoy's Complaint / Our Gang / The Breast
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback