Álvaro Enrigue presents Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Lainez

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About the book:

A lavishly written gothic historical fantasy novel that centers around Pier Francesco Orsini, the tortured duke of Bomarzo and creator of the Italian town’s famously bizarre “Garden of the Monsters.”

Forty miles north of Rome, near the village of Bomarzo, Pier Francesco Orsini created a park of monstrous statuary in which the nightmares of the Renaissance stand preserved in stone. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez—one of the major Argentine novelists of the twentieth century—re-creates this dark and legendary duke as a briliant memoirist. From beyond the grave, in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez's own Buenos Aires, Orsini—who now knows his Freud and has read Lolita—looks back at the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life.

Bomarzo is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of a hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain. It is also a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it is an immersive story told in a sumptuous style—like one of Poe's Italian tales rewritten by Proust—as Gregory Rabassa's translation beautifully conveys.

About the participants:

Álvaro Enrigue has been a fellow in the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de México, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, and the program in Latin American studies at Princeton University. He is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, among them Sudden Death, Now I Surrender, and You Dreamed of Empires. He teaches at Hofstra University.

Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is the editor-in-chief of Kismet Magazine.

Xita Rubert is a Spanish novelist based in New York City. In 2024 she was the recipient of the Herralde Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for the novel in the Spanish language. Her books have been translated into several languages, with an English edition of The Key Biscayne Affair forthcoming from Ecco in 2026. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where her work focuses on Latin American literature.

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