"
Talking to yourself is said to be a sign of impending mental collapse"
, but ...
I just saw that I mentioned
Jusep Torres Campalans by Max Aub as a favourite book in the Questionnaire thread above, so I guess I should say a few words about it. (Note to self: emphasis on
few please!)
This one's actually half novel, half practical joke. It's the biography of Jusep Torres Campalans, a cubist painter who lived in Paris in the early years of the 20th century and moved in the same circles as Picasso, Braque, Gris et al. It was he who coined the expression "
cubism"
for the exciting new artistic movement he was involved in. He's completely fictional of course, but the trick is that the author (Max Aub) didn't mention that little fact when the book was first published.
After the book came out (and the author organised a show of Torres' surviving works), interesting things began to happen. People suddenly "
remembered"
the forgotten painter. Picasso (who was remotely acquainted with Aub) was evasive, but others claimed to have known him well. Some suspected the fake from the beginning, but it only became really clear and generally accepted several years after initial publication.
But going beyond the gimmick level, the amazing thing is that there
is a great deal of documentation about Torres: starting with a dozen or so paintings, a very thorough catalogue of his works with their owners and locations as of the early 1940s, the artist's secret private and artistic diary, a short description of Aub's meeting the old painter in some god-forsaken American jungle ... all of those and more are reprinted in the book, and all were actually written and/or painted by Aub. And yes, he's a good writer, and yes, he gets the different text styles dead right. The diary in particular is on the one hand absolutely believable as a first-hand document from the struggle of someone who is taking art far out into unknown territory ... and at the same time it works as a hilarious send-up of itself if you know that it was actually written several decades later, when all these new and exciting developments were a) fairly well known if maybe not liked, and b) documented in any decent and recent encyclopaedia. Similarly the paintings are more or less tongue-in-cheek -- if you look at them
expecting them to be.
And that last level is what ultimately makes this book so interesting: It raises the question of where artistic value and merit comes from in a context where ideas are more important than technique, and (important sign of quality there) while it does suggest some answers it doesn't try to force any on you.
So, in summary: cool, funny, well made, interesting and challenging. My kind of book.
It is a tiny bit raunchy in cerain areas but the descriptions are amazing.
and explosions 
and horrible circumstances.
It'll be even better that the book is also popular in non-English speaking countries,but not the Chicken Soup for The Soul type. Err...excuse my poor expression,if any. 
.