Author(s): Ventura Ametller; Ot Capa (Translator); Douglas Suttle

Novel | Translated fiction | Spain | 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize long list | Small Press

In outrageous, daring prose, Ventura Ametller tells the story of a young boy as he lives through the build-up to and outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Blending fact and fiction, legend and history, Summa Kaotica is a tour de force, an explosion of language and literature. It is one of the most outstanding, groundbreaking works of art ever written in the Catalan language. The book begins with the discovery of a tattered text belonging to the anti-historian Petter White O'Sullivan, and it is his text that the reader is reading. He tells the story of the creation of Anamorphus, formally Protomorphus, as he begins his life as a spermatozoon, then a foetus, before being born into the village of Poel. From here, we follow his life as he grows up and witnesses - often from a child's point of view - some of the most important events on the 20th Century.