Creature of a Day     by Juan Tovar Edited by Leland H. Chambers Original title: Criatura de una dia Original language: Spanish Original year: 1982 Country: Mexico   Published by McPherson & Co Pub. Date: 2002 Pub. Place: USA Format: Hardcover, 160 pages Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 ISBN: 0929701682 Edition: 1st Edition List Price: $20.00 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

Border crossing may be literal, figurative, imaginary, symbolic or psychological, or, as in the Mexican novelist Juan Tovar's Creature of a Day, all of these at once. This richly conceived prose fiction (a novel in the freshest sense) enchants and seduces the reader with a beguiling tableau of tales told in a language contemporary yet resonant of Calderón de la Barca, Chaucer and Shakespeare.


"Creature of a Day is the story of a spiritual pilgrimage filled with revelations of the soul, written with tension and brilliance unique in modern [Mexican] literature. The prose is akin to the emotional texture of poetry, reminiscent of sacred literature; at once a textual initiation and the allegorical representation of crossed destinies, Creature of a Day fills the reader with astonishment and emotion. Tovar manages to marry intelligence to passion, ultimately resolving, in every memorable page, all the imagination and plasticity of his narrative project." ?Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Coleccion Astericos

"The stories of Juan Tovar are an elaborate web of interconnected destinies circumnavigated by the brevity of a world about to end. Creature of a Day is a voluptuous rose, flowering with lyrics from an ideal dream where fantasy meets and becomes lost in the everyday meandering of its characters, a song teeming with an interior and steady-handed sarcasm." ?Eduardo Altuzar, Diaro de Mexico

"Creature of a Day is a revisitation to the original fire and history of Western spirituality, to the medieval marriage of pagan sentiment to the fervor of early Christianity. At the same time cryptic and pristine, even monastic in its mystical unraveling of the tragic sense of life, the novel presents itself as a labyrinth or a rose, as a beautifully constructed symmetry built upon twists and turns and shade?. The result is a book of peculiar beauty, fluid and morose, [sublimely] grotesque, in a bewitching style and charged language, filled to capacity with exaltation. Creature of a Day is a handsome pastiche of our world as an island drifting in the ocean of the Universe." ?Ricardo Pohlenz, El Semanario

"Tovar's obsession is with the 'devastating whiteness' of a virgin sheet of paper about to fill itself with signs, with the residual fuel, the Promethean fire that gives birth to us creatures of a day each dawn, until finally we converge and fall into the night, blackened full with the day's procedure, and collapse and return to ash." ? Esther Seligson, Revista Siempre