A novel by José Lezama Lima at Sábado del libro

Oppiano Licario, a work by the writer, poet and essayist José Lezama Lima, published posthumously in 1977, will be presented on July 29th at the usual Sábado del libro space, on Calle de Madera, in the historic center of Havana.

The text is a continuation of Paradiso, and although it is unfinished, the author has managed to return to and deepen the ideas already presented in Paradiso, his first novel, such as the importance of the image as a substitute for what has been lost, poetry as a way of recreating the world, and the search for transcendental knowledge, driven by the «Eros of knowledge», which makes it possible to restore the link between the telluric and the stellar, as Cubaliteraria points out.

Oppiano Licario, José Cemí’s mentor and spiritual guide, has died, but his image continues to be felt as a presence in the character of his daughter, Ynaca Eco, and in the reflections and behaviors of Cemí and Fronesis.

Licario also left a manuscript, the Súmula, which is lost in a hurricane in one of the book’s most memorable passages, and Cemí entrusts Fronesis with the reconstruction of the text, which is reduced to the pages of a poem.

The novel was published in simultaneous editions by Editorial Arte y Literatura, Cuba, and Ediciones Era, Mexico. The original prologue was written by his great friend Manuel Moreno Fraginals.

Oppiano Licario prolongs and culminates the themes presented in Paradiso, his masterpiece, brilliantly concluding one of the greatest narrative cycles in Cuban literature.

Translated by Luis E. Amador Dominguez