Soy un Escritor Frustrado by Jose Angel Manas

I recently purchased a ticket to Buenos Aires, Argentina. I will be going for two weeks at the end of the summer and am obviously very excited. To get prepared for the trip, I figured I better brush up on my Spanish skills. I haven't had a need to speak Spanish in over two years and am now realizing the importance of staying fresh with a language. My first major effort to reinvigorate my Spanish language skills was reading this book. Hands down, this was the most fucked up book I've ever read. I found myself checking a Spanish dictionary just to verify that what I thought I was reading was true. Here is the synopsis: A struggling author who works as a English professor has extreme writer's block; it is destroying his life. Then one day one of his students asks him to proofread a novel she just wrote. He loves the novel and decides to publish it under his own name. To prevent her from exposing his fraud, he kidnaps her and burns down her house. The book does end happily though because even though she is dead and mutilated from all the sex he had with her dead body, his writer block lifts and he can write again. Those Spanish authors, they write good ones.

Completed: May 2007