This may sound absurd - but "Locos-...." is truly the work of a genius. Some books surpass the boundaries of time and this is one such book. To summarize the book in one sentence will be like this "non-characters are characters, fiction is reality and solutions are problems".
Felipe Alfau was a strange character and so are his books - very very different, they remind us of the writings of Vargas Llosa with a taste of Cortazar. This is not a translation rather Alfau has written the book in English so all the spices of the Spanish culture are visible. This is extremely rare even with the best of the translators. You get a taste of Spain and a vivid picture of the vibrant society which was so different from the rest of Europe. The people are full of life and passion. Love and passion are the means for making life flow and may be we all need to follow that some day.
You can look at this book either as a short story book or a novel - since it has nine short stories which can either be individually read but they are also connected to each other.
I am long time fan of Marquez and I can promise that this book is equally impressive as any book from Marquez. It is a must buy.

I share the puzzlement of the reviewer below over why this isn't considered one of the 20th Century's great works of fiction. I'd go further and say this is probably the most underrated novel of the last 100 years. The most important literature not only blazes a trail, but does so in a way that compares favorably to the books it inspires. This is true for Locos. The book should have had a stronger edit, but what Alfau achieves here - stories that rewrite each other, characters who morph into each other - unleashed new powers from the fictional narrative that have yet to be fully tapped. There's a moment at the end of a story called "A Character" that is one of the very few mindblowing experiences I've had reading fiction. Alfau was probably the first novelist since Laurence Sterne to understand this potential in narration. There's a character in Locos named Fulano who, desperate to get others to notice him, breaks a storefront window. The owner comes out, ignores Fulano and wonders how such a thing could have happened. In a sad way, Locos is like Fulano. Everyone marvels at the glass it shattered, but nobody can see Locos.

I can't understand why this is not regarded as one of the greatest works of modern fiction. It anticipates many of the great writers of the latter half of the century, while being every bit as good as those who came later. The first two chapters are a bit hard and left this reader thinking Very clever, but.....

However the next three stories are excellent and I was quickly drawn into the surreal world of Alfau. Each chapter works well as a short story, but the further the reader digs, the more the stories link into a single novel rich in characters and ideas. Borges, Calvino, Kundera and the Boom-time Latin Americans were great writers, but after reading Alfau I realise they were not as original as I'd long thought. A book waiting to be rediscovered (again!).

It is hard to know what to say about this book. The first fify pages were the most invigorating I have read in a long time, full of interesting characters and observations as well as tremendous wit. I could hardly wait to read on, but as I did, I began to grow disappointed and eventually ran out of enthusiasm. I plodded to the end but it was heavy going. The novel-within-a-novel concept can work under certain circumstances but this is not one of them. The excerpt from the character Garcia's novel added nothing and were an irritating distraction from the main event. Alfau would have benefitted from having a good editor. All in all, an idea with enormous potential that starts off brilliantly but fades all too quickly.

There are so many interesting things to say about Felipe Alfau and his novel, "Chromos," that it is difficult to decide where to begin. There is the novel itself, of course, a complex and sometimes difficult post-modernist narrative written years before the appearance of the so-called post-modernists (Alfau was, in other words, ahead of his time). There is the history of the novel's publication, a fascinating tale in its own right. There is the fact that Alfau, a Spaniard who came to the United States at the age of fourteen, wrote "Chromos" and his earlier novel, "Locos," in English, rather than his native Spanish. And there is, finally, the biography and the views of the author himself-the former enigmatic, almost mysterious, in its obscurity; the latter disturbingly reactionary, reminiscent of Ezra Pound and forcing the reader to separate the man from his work.

"Chromos" is a series of narratives within narratives of a coterie of Spanish immigrants living in New York City sometime between the two World Wars. Among the main characters is Don Pedro Guzman O'Moor Algoracid, also known as Peter Guz and the Moor, and his close friend, Dr. Jose de los Rios, whom the Moor calls Dr. Jesuscristo. It is the Moor who first tells the novel's unidentified first person narrator to write the story of Spaniards living in New York, of the "Americaniards" as he calls them:

"You should write a book about the Americaniards, somebody should-but you have not written for a long time-anyway you could not write any more about your people in Spain-have been too long away, forgotten too much-don't know what it's all about and you could not write about Americans-don't know enough-impossible ever to understand another people. I could not understand them when I first came and every day I understand them less. We meet, we talk, but neither knows what it's all about-total confusion. My English was abominable when I arrived and everyday I speak it worse-impossible; can't understand a damn thing."

It is this request that frames the narrative, the Moor mysteriously taking the reluctant narrator to an old, dark, cockroach-infested basement apartment devoid of furniture (except for a book-filled bookcase), its walls covered by chromos-chromolithographs-"depicting people and scenes that came to life, but more like things remembered or imagined."

From this place, the unidentified narrator of "Chromos" relates his close relationship with the writer Garcia. It is Garcia who provides two narratives within the larger framing story, reading aloud to the narrator from two different works-one the seemingly "corny" and salacious multi-generational saga of the rise and decline of the Sandoval family in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain, the other the cinematic narrative of a Spaniard named Ramos who, in a Mephistophelian bargain, is given the ability to skip through time and emigrates to America in the early twentieth century. All the time, while Garcia narrates the stories contained in his two novels, the larger narrative of "Chromos" provides a first-person account of the day-to-day life of the Moor, Dr. de los Rios, Garcia, and the narrator. And the narrator, too, provides another narration as he sees into the mind-sees the imagination and dreams-of the seemingly forlorn, hapless character Fulano. Indeed, one of the most powerful narrative sequences of "Chromos" occurs near the end, when the narrator details Fulano's sordid, obsessive, sexual and homicidal dreams of a female store mannequin.

"Chromos" is, in short, a complex novel that reminds the reader of the post-modern writings of Borges, Calvino, Coover, Pynchon, and others. It is, in this sense, a remarkable achievement since it was written in 1948, long before such fictions became prominent. And this leads us to the next part of the story, the fact that while "Chromos" was written in 1948, it was not published until 1990, when it was nominated for the National Book Award. For this, we have an editor of the Dalkey Archive to thank. As related in a 1990 article in Newsday, reprinted at the Dalkey Archive web site (http://www.centerforbookculture.org):

"In 1987, Steve Moore, [an editor at] a small publishing company, Dalkey Archive, found a copy of "Locos" [Alfau's 1936 novel] at a barn sale in Massachusetts. He paid $10 for it and after reading it, immediately found Mr. Alfau's number in the Manhattan phone book. Mr. Alfau, living alone in Chelsea, told them to publish the book if they wanted to; he didn't care what happened. When "Locos" did reasonably well, Mr. Alfau told them to use the money for somebody else's unpublished work. He had no use for money. Moore asked Mr. Alfau if he had written anything else. Mr. Alfau took "Chromos" out of the dresser where it had been since 1948."

While a native Spaniard and Spanish speaker, Alfau wrote in English and, for this reason, he has been compared to other writers who adopted another, non-native language for writing their fictions, writers like Conrad, Beckett, Nabokov, and Brodsky. Indeed, the first paragraph of "Chromos" adumbrates the theme not only of the immigrant living in a foreign country, but the way that immigrant experience is further occluded by language:

"The moment one learns English, complications set in. Try as one may, one cannot elude this conclusion, one must inevitably come back to it. This applies to all persons, including those born to the language and, at times, even more so to Latins, including Spaniards. It manifests itself in an awareness of implications and intricacies to which one had never given a thought; it afflicts one with that officiousness of philosophy which, having no business of its own, gets in everybody's way and, in the case of Latins, they lose that racial characteristic of taking things for granted and leaving them to their own devices without inquiring into causes, motives or ends, to meddle indiscreetly into reasons which are none of one's affair and to become not only self-conscious, but conscious of other things which never gave a damn for one's existence."

So what is a reader of "Chromos" to make of all this? If you believe Alfau himself, not too much. When asked in an interview about the sale of his first novel, "Locos," which departed drastically from the commercially accepted novels of the time, he replied: "I got $250 for 'Locos.' But you are right. In fact, I don't see how anybody could like my books or could even understand them. They are unreadable."

In that same interview, published in the Spring, 1993, edition of Review of Contemporary Fiction (and reprinted at the Dalkey Archive web site), Alfau-ninety years old at the time and demonstrating his reputation as iconoclastic, opinionated, curmudgeonly, and politically incorrect-is quoted as follows: "I think democracy is a disgrace. Machiavelli was absolutely right: the difference between tyranny and democracy is that in tyranny you need to serve only one master, whereas in a pluralistic society you have to obey many. I always thought Generalissimo Francisco Franco was a trustworthy ruler of Spain, and thus supported him. Since his death, the Iberian peninsula is in complete chaos. In fact, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, I championed Franco's cause in this country as much as I could."

While Alfau's politics and personality may seem anathema, "Chromos" is a remarkable work of literary imagination and narrative structure that should be read by anyone interested in modern and post-modern writing. While perhaps "unreadable," as Alfau says, by those looking for a traditional linear narrative with an unvarnished plot, "Chromos" is a joyride for those who like experimentation, complexity and intellectual pyrotechnics.

I'll post a longer review of this work when I have time here. I once wrote a glowing book review about this book 10 years ago. This is one of these rare finds by Dalkey Archive press, which (admittedly) publishes esoteric and hard-to-read fiction. Out of nowhere, it was nominated for the National Book Award in 1990 or so, propelling this old man to some fame and notoriety.

I remember Proust's metaphor in one of his books about one's literary works existing as separate creatures from the author, like little girls dancing around the death bed of a dying author. I think Alfau was interviewed as saying something like, I wrote this book decades ago. Why all of a sudden this attention?

I used to give this book as the answer to the question of "what is your favorite book" because no one has ever heard of it (though I imagine university readers at the writing program where I taught, Johns Hopkins, would be sympathetic to this writing). Actually, although parts of it are long-winded, in general the narrative is conventional and full of old-fashioned storytelling. The characters engage in multiple philosophical conversations about time,reality and a lot of other things. I would compare this to Dostoevksy (in terms of the philosophical plane it travels on, not the plot, which is rather lackadaisical). Although there certainly is a tinge of European postmodern fiction here, unlike the fiction of Barth, there are not narrative tricks that distract from the story at hand. The end kind of wanders, but how fun it was getting there. You read for the set pieces, not for the overall plot. For variety, check out his short stories in Locos: A Comedy of Gestures. They are priceless gems.

You have to be in the right frame of mind for philosophical digressions and plot that advances mainly through conversation, but if you are, you won't find it difficult to get into this book at all.

To be honest, I've never met another person who has actually read this book, and it would be interesting to read responses from others who have read this book.

I should point out that I am writing these impressions about 10 years after reading the book. I remember almost nothing, and yet I remember how I felt reading it and the impressions it left on me. Does this count as a legitimate review? It will be fun knowing that the book is there waiting to be picked up again.