The first English translation of a classic of fin de siecle Catalan literature. It is based on the conflict between the Individual and Society, Good and Evil, Life and Death, the Spirit and the Flesh. The protagonist, Father Latzer, a priest banished for doctrinal heresy to an isolated, backward mountain parish, struggles to achieve personal redemption by bringing salvation to his primitive, taciturn, rural flock. Their mute atavism is disturbed only by the local whore, Footloose, embodying all the forces against which the priest's reforming mission is directed, and ambiguity surrounds the denouement of that conflict. The action is set in a recognisable time and a landscape which, through the power of Casellas's language, is endowed with a complex poetic charge and is as compelling today as when it was first written. AUTHOR: Raimon Casellas i Dou (b. Barcelona 1855) died, almost certainly by suicide, in 1910. The motives for his premature death can be read between the lines of his 1901 novel Dark Vales (Els sots feréstecs). He published two collections of short stories (Les multituds: 1906; Llibre d'histories: 1909). Casellas was an art historian, critic and a leading figure in Catalan Modernisme, which aspired to set Catalan culture on the same cosmopolitan footing as the advanced national cultures of contemporary Europe. Translator Alan Yates' first English translation of 'Dark Vales' allows English readers to appreciate the work of one of the most important Catalan authors of his period.
