Schavelzon Graham Agencia literaria Barcelona

The Paper House

NOVEL. MONDADORI, 2007. 120 PAGES.

In the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon, a Cambridge academic who has just acquired a copy of Emily Dickinson's POEMS from a second-hand bookshop in Soho, is knocked down and killed at a crossroads. Following Bluma's death, a colleague finds in her house a copy of Conrad's THE SHADOW LINE inscribed with a mysterious dedication and crusted around the edges with what appears to be cement. Intrigued, the colleague begins an investigation which will take him on a journey from Cambridge to Buenos Aires and across the River Plate to Montevideo as he hunts for clues to the identity and fate of an obscure and dedicated bibliophile. He learns the story of Carlos Brauer, a man whose obsession for books is all consuming. Vast bookcases fill his rooms from end to end, floor to ceiling, forcing his car out of the garage and even himself out of his bedroom and in to the attic. Books are arranged according to a strict system: Shakespeare cannot be placed next to Marlowe, because of accusations of plagiarism between the two, and Martin Amis cannot sit alongside Julian Barnes. All becomes dependent upon a complex indexing system, which will ultimately prove to be the undoing of this man of books.

Translated into 24 languages and more than 150.000 copies sold.

"Good things come in small packages. You may buy it without worrying

about finding room for it on your shelves. I have already found such a place

-between a copy of a novel by Italo Calvino and a collection

of the stories of Dino Buzzati."

Alexander McCall Smith,

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"It is an appealing cautionary tale about the dangers

of owning too many books."

Miranda France, THE TELEGRAPH

"A masterpiece."

FRANKISCHE LANDZDESZEITUNG

"Readers should not be fooled by the miniature nature of this work for,

like much of Borges' canon, many large themes are touched upon:

the nature of time, infinity, labyrinths, reality, and identity.

Books create labyrinths of rooms, libraries and collections define identity a

nd reality is subsumed when Bauer loses the index to his massive

and valuable collection of books."

Janelle Martin, READY STEADY BOOK

"The novel The House of Paper is an homage to Joseph Conrad, to whom Carlos María Domínguez dedicates the book, but it is also an homage to Onetti, Borges, García Márquez and all the bibliophiles that have ever lived."

J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, LA VANGUARDIA

"Like every book written about other books, The House of Paper has plenty of in-jokes, parody, and references to other works that form the basis of its plot, thus giving one the feeling that they are entering a house of mirrors in which we sometimes sense the shadow of Joseph Conrad, at others El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges, but even more often feel the references multiplying and eluding us without harming an intelligent plot which, with a further dose of political and metaphysical intrigue, tells the tale of the exciting inquiry of a literature professor at Cambridge who sets out to uncover a hidden relationship between a certain novel by Conrad and the death of the woman he loved."

Arturo García Ramos, ABC