Attila

(Paperback)

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"My life will not make any sense when Attila is finished," declared Aliocha Coll about his mesmerizing final novel. In this groundbreaking "untranslatable" work, he channels Joycean experimentalism to explore the fragility of empires, the future of the city, and the weight of legacy.

Attila the Hun, reimagined as a visionary leader, contemplates the fate of his people at the gates of Rome. His son, Quijote, is caught between empires and ideals, forced to choose between his father's vision of a Hunnic utopia and the decaying allure of Roman civilization. As Rome burns, Quijote journeys through both real and surreal landscapes, encountering psychedelic visions, mystical revelations, and existential dilemmas.

Quijote's journey blurs the lines between past and future, uniting Biblical, Classical, and Buddhist traditions while moving between planes of existence. Attilais an intricate and elusive masterpiece from the explosive and disorienting imagination of Aliocha Coll, where characters from myth and history intermingle in a stunning labyrinth of allegory and metaphor.

Reviews

Aliocha Coll represents that ideal of an uncompromising artist to which many authors aspire in their romantic fantasies, but very few dare to achieve. [. . .] He intertwines alliterations and assonances as ingeniously as the medieval artisans interlaced decorative laths between the rafter beams."--The Untranslated

"A brilliant and extraordinary man, very gifted from childhood, and with an extraordinary vocation. He chose the path of revolutionising the word, with books that were excessively avant-garde for the ordinary reader, and represented a break away from commonplace language." -Carmen Balcells

"Attila does not respect the prescriptive separation between drama, prose and poetry, which occur throughout the work, nor the traditional rules of punctuation, and the pauses in his prose are often those of breath, as happens in some poetry; the entire work is governed by lexical richness and invention and by the discovery of surprising metaphors and similes [. . .] A narrative that, without being conventional, tells a story that is clearly intelligible. And captivating. [. . .] This is a grenade, without a doubt, but opened and filled with sweet, garnet-colored seeds."--ABC

Author Bio

The pseudonym of Javier Coll Mata (Madrid, May 6, 1948Paris, November 15, 1990),Aliocha Collwas a Spanish writer and translator raised in Barcelona who spent several years of his adult life in Paris, where he committed suicide after completingAttila. He is the subject of "Everything Bad Comes Back" by Javier Maras, and believed inFinnegans Wakeas the "starting point" for contemporary literature. In addition toAttila, he wrote a couple novels, a play, and several essays, but the majorityhis work was either published posthumously or remains unpublished, despite Spanish super agent Carmen Balcells backing him throughout her life as the future of Spanish literature.

Katie Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Her translations include novels by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durn, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, Katixa Agirre, Jon Bilbao, Juan Gmez Brcena, Almudena Snchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adn. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 for Lara Moreno's In Case We Lose Power, and has been a finalist for the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Prize and the Queen Sofa Spanish Institute Translation Prize, and longlisted for the National Translation Award.