Call Me Brooklyn - Paperback

by Eduardo Lago (Author), Ernesto Mestre-Reed (Translator)

Through an ingenious structure that jumps from narrator to narrator and spans decades, Call Me Brooklyn follows the life of Gal Ackerman, a Spanish orphan adopted during the Spanish Civil War and raised in Brooklyn, NY. Moving from the secret tunnels that shelter the forgotten residents of Manhattan to the studio where Mark Rothko put an end to his life, from the jazz clubs frequented by Thomas Pynchon to the bar in Madrid where we learn the truth about Ackerman's past, Call Me Brooklyn draws upon a rich tradition that includes Nabokov's Pale Fire, Bellow's Humbolt's Gift, and the novels of Felipe Alfau--a hymn to mystery and to the power of fiction.

Back Jacket

Eduardo Lago s Call Me Brooklyn, the story of a writer trying to complete his dead friend s unfinished novel . . . is a brilliant act of border-crossing: from country to country, text to text, and mind to mind. It is crazily romantic, excitingly unstable, remorselessly literary, and true to this present-day world in which we are all at once citizens and aliens. Luc Sante

This masterful, beautifully grave and intimate novel has haunted me. Eduardo Lago, a Spanish novelist who has lived for decades in New York, voices songs of love and sorrow and loneliness in a novel that brings the past painful memories of the Spanish Civil War into a present where it burns like the friendship between the two main characters, confiding stories and mysteries in a seedy Brooklyn bar. Francisco Goldman

One of the finest novels from Europe in the last decades a book of fantastic courage, otherworldly wisdom, and intense power. Lago is simply extraordinary. Junot Diaz

Eduardo Lago, the last great revelation of Spanish literature, is a survivor who belongs to the strange race of those who still believe in the power of the written word. Enrique Vila-Matas