The legend of cyclists

Original Language: Serbocroat
Títulu Original: Fama about cyclists
Year of publication: 1988
Translation: Juan Cristóbal Díaz
Valoración: Out of competition

And that Eddy Merckx was a member of the Southeast Group of Evangelical Cyclists! And that in the book there are a few bicycles! But this is not what it seems because today we talk about a “weird” book of a “weird” yugoslav, it is worth the redundancy.

If we pay attention to the author’s prologue, written 20 years after the original publication of the book (who would dream this prologue?), Legend is a novel about human errors and frustrations in the task of dedicating useless efforts to forget God and to mock death. By itself, this does not seem too strange. On the other hand, the thing is twisted if I say that it is a compilation of texts of the secret society of the Rosicrucian cyclists that engenders a kind of esoteric cycling doctrine. Or not?

So we have, on the one hand, a secret society whose followers meet in dreams and that intends, or so, the penetration in the world of such magnitude of irrational forces of the spirit that it ends purified by a saving fire. And we have, on the other hand, a series of texts (manuscripts, testimonies, daily, proclamations, projects) and images that would become the historical and doctrinal body of the society of the society of the society Hermanitos.

And it is inevitable to remember Borges, Pynchon or Cartararescu (also Kadaré) when reading a text in which spacetime borders jump through the air, by advancing in a novel full of mystifications, aporia, cross references, theories to which the most crazy or more rope, characters that are unfolded, mirrors, etc. Pure and hard postmodernism, go.

What I think differentiates from the authors cited is humor. There is a lot of mockery, irony, demystification or absurd The legend of cyclists. Already the texts that open the novel (that of Carlos the ugly and his slender Grosman) give a good idea of ​​what will come later. Another example:

The perspective of a fifty -year -old man dressed in a dusty sports attire must attract attention. Maybe it was my attractive appearance which inclined the balance when it came to the prophet: it was truly striking. The prophets are called to prophesy and the people to chase the prophets. This is how the world works.

More. The fragmentary book character means that the interest of the different texts that compose it is, almost mandatory, something unequal. Stories such as the last case of Sherlock Holmes or as that of the architect in charge of repairing the cathedral of the Holy Spirit, destroyed by the Nazi police (Redundancy is worth it) From the dream they are as bravely fun as arid are the parts centered on the philosophical/ esoteric postulates of Kowalski and company.

Finally, it only remains to say that it is undeniable that The legend of cyclists It is not a suitable book for all audiences. Who wants a linear story with approach, knot and outcome, who looks for entertainment and not think too much or whoever intends to take a rate reading that another book is looking for. But whoever likes the risk and literary artifacts, who thinks that reality is a drill, existence an illusion and literature the illusion of an illusion, surely enjoys this Yugoslav delirium.

PS: We already commented on the review of THE ATTENDE ANGELbut it doesn’t hurt to insist: it does not have to be easy to translate and correct a text like this. I think translation and correction are very successful. And the book edition is very, very cool.