Books - Lorca: A Dream of Life

With a rare blend of grace, warmth, and scholarship, Leslie Stainton raises the stakes of our appreciation for the greatest of Spain's modern poets, Federico Garca Lorca. Drawing on fourteen years of research; more than a hundred letters unknown to prior biographers; exclusive interviews with Lorca's friends, family, and acquaintances; and dozens of newly discovered archival material, Stainton has brought her subject to life as few writers can. She describes his carefree childhood in rural Andalusia; his residencies in Madrid and Granada, then in New York, Havana, and Buenos Aires; his potent interaction with other Spanish artists, such as Salvador Dal, Luis Buuel, and the composer Manuel de Falla; and, finally, Stainton shows how Lorca's marginal political activity during the Spanish Civil War still cost him his life.

Throughout, Stainton meticulously but unobtrusively relates the oeuvre to the life. Her biography is quickly becoming the standard one-volume work on the poet.

Federico GarcĂ­a Lorca (1898-1936) was not yet 40 when he was executed by Falangists during the Spanish Civil War, yet he already towered over literature in Spain. He was arguably his generation's greatest poet and playwright. Although Lorca was best known in his lifetime for works like Gypsy Ballads and Blood Wedding, which expressed the soulful intensity of his native Andalusia, this well-researched, probing biography reminds readers that he was both cosmopolitan and unpredictable as an artist and a man. Despite his privileged background, Lorca was "a poet of the people who viewed poetry as something that walks along the streets," someone who wrote as naturally as he breathed and loved music and drawing nearly as much as poetry and drama. Leslie Stainton, an American scholar who lived in Spain for several years while researching this book, perceptively analyzes Lorca's homosexuality, his left-wing political views, and his artistic convictions, painting an intriguing picture of a man whose strong feelings and beliefs were tempered by a dislike of being pinned down. Though judiciously critical in evaluating Lorca's work, the author conveys with force her appreciation of his ability to forge new language for the exploration of age-old themes: "the capriciousness of time, the impossibility of love, the phantoms of identity, art, childhood, sex, and death." --Wendy Smith

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