Juan Manuel de Prada presents his book 'A thousand eyes hide the night'. The Luzzy

SYNOPSIS

The author focuses on the community of Spanish artists who, after the Civil War, ended up in German-occupied Paris, where living conditions were especially difficult and where they had to use any resource at their disposal to survive, even though this put them in front of moral dilemmas that were very difficult to resolve.

The protagonist Fernando Navales , a character already in the pages of Las máscaras del Héroe, is a hustler writer as gifted with a talent for manipulation as he is lacking the slightest scruple, a more than perfect antihero, driven by resentment, the darkest, most persistent and treacherous of human weaknesses.

The fearsome police commissioner Urraca, police attaché at the Spanish embassy in Paris, entrusts Navales with a disturbing mission that suits him perfectly: to get Spanish artists in occupied Paris to align themselves with the Falangist postulates. The pages of this novel feature such well-known personalities as Picasso, César González Ruano and Gregorio Marañón, along with other very interesting supporting characters such as Serrano Suñer, Ana de Pombo and María Casares. They all make up a cast whose adventures oscillate between tragedy, the natural portrait of the deepest abysses of abjection and the purest picaresque novel.

 

Juan Manuel de Prada was born in Baracaldo in 1970, although he spent his childhood and adolescence in Zamora. With his first book, Coños (1995), and the stories in El silencio del patinador (1995, expanded in 2010), he surprised critics with his powerful imagination and bold use of language. In 1996, he made his debut in the novel Las máscaras del héroe (The Masks of the Hero), for which he won the RNE Ojo Crítico Prize for Narrative. In 1997, he received the Planeta Prize for La tempestad (The Tempest), which was translated into twenty languages ​​and meant his international acclaim, after The New Yorker magazine selected him as one of the six most promising writers in Europe. His novel Las esquinas del aire (2000) was also received with enthusiasm by readers and critics, as was Desgarrados y excéntricos (2001). La vida invisible (2003) received the Primavera Prize and the National Narrative Prize, and with El siglo velo (2007) she won the Biblioteca Breve Prize and the Castilla y León Critics' Prize. In 2012 she published Me hallará la muerte (Death Will Find Me), and in 2014, with Espasa, Morir bajo tu cielo (Dying Under Your Sky). In 2015 she published El castillo de diamante (The Diamond Castle), awarded the Castilla y León Critics' Prize, and in 2019 the thriller Lucía en la noche (Lucia in the Night). At the end of 2022 she published her monumental doctoral thesis, El derecho a sueño (The Right to Dream), based on the life of Ana María Martínez Sagi. Her latest book is the essay Raros como yo (Rare Like Me) (Espasa, 2023).
 She has received the most prestigious awards in literary journalism; among others, the Mariano de Cavia and Julio Camba awards.