A Thousand Eyes Hide in the Night

Singular, polemical, and brilliant, the most ambitious novel by Juan Manuel de Prada.

Juan Manuel de Prada combines his enormous talent for narrative with a deep knowledge of the intellectual, artistic, and especially literary landscape of Spain in the first half of the 20th century. The result is a memorable literary project of extraordinary quality in the grand baroque and grotesque tradition of Spanish literature: Quevedo, Valle-Inclán, or Ramón Gómez de la Serna.

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 means at their disposal to survive, even if it put them face to face with very difficult moral dilemmas.

The protagonist, Fernando Navales, a character already present in The Masks of the Hero, is a writer and hustler as talented at manipulation as he is devoid of the slightest scruple, a quintessential antihero driven by resentment, the darkest, most persistent, and treacherous of human weaknesses.

The fearsome commissioner Urraca, police attaché at the Spanish embassy in Paris, assigns Navales a disturbing mission that suits him perfectly: to get the Spanish artists in occupied Paris to align with Falangist positions. Personalities
as well-known as Picasso, César González Ruano, or Gregorio Marañón parade through the pages of this novel, along with other interesting secondary characters like Serrano Suñer, Ana de Pombo, or María Casares. They all form a cast whose adventures oscillate between tragedy, naturalistic portraiture
of the deepest abysses of abjection, and pure picaresque novel.