{"product_id":"siege-in-the-room","title":"Siege in the Room","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis volume brings together three short novels by Catalan literature's great maverick and recluse, each depicting a brutal, abstract world where words are the only reality--shifting between the erudite, the archaic, and the vulgar. \"Carrer Marsala,\" which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya--neither of which Bau bothered to accept--is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with dental hygiene, sex, and his own squalid rooms in Barcelona. In \"The Old Man,\" the narrator observes a strange building where a decrepit prisoner is ritually beaten by a policeman once a week. \"The Warden\" details the narrator's own captivity, and his relationship with the woman who keeps him prisoner. In Martha Tennent's haunting translation, reminiscent of a Mediterranean Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, Miquel Bau 's work is a pungent reminder of the ways the world fails its prophets and pariahs.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dalkey Archive Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48841239822541,"sku":"9781564787705","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0557\/1529\/9533\/files\/imageloader_14b39482-cebe-4b08-92e2-353943ffdaac.jpg?v=1792025721","url":"https:\/\/booksatmidnight.com\/products\/siege-in-the-room","provider":"Books At Midnight","version":"1.0","type":"link"}