Alejandro Jodorowsky was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants
in Tocopilla, Chile. From an early age, he became interested in
mime and theater; at the age of 23, he left for Paris to pursue the
arts, and has lived there ever since. A friend and companion of
Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, he founded the Panic movement
and has directed several classic films of this style, including The
Holy Mountain, El Topo and Santa Sangre. A mime artist, specialist
in the art of tarot, and prolific author, he has written novels,
poetry, short stories, essays, and over thirty successful comic
books, working with such highly regarded comic book artists as
Moebius and Bess. Restless Books will be publishing three of
Jodorowsky's best-known books for the first time in English: Donde
mejor canta un pájaro (Where the Bird Sings Best), El niño del
jueves negro (The Son of Black Thursday), and Albina y los hombres
perro (Albina and the Dog Men).
Alfred MacAdam is professor of Latin American literature at
Barnard College-Columbia University. He has translated works by
Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Carlos Onetti, José
Donoso, and Jorge Volpi among others. He recently published an
essay on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa included in the
Cambridge Companion to Autobiography.
"Jodorowsky is today’s true Renaissance man—a master of many
mediums that all point directly towards a towering and imaginative
vision replete with profound insights into the real by way of the
surreal. The stories told in Where the Bird Sings Best contain deep
moral lessons, giving his mythic immigration story the feel of a
modern day Sefer-ha-Aggadah—the classic collection of Jewish folk
tales drawn from the Mishnah, Midrash and Talmud. This long awaited
and brilliantly evocative translation is a must read—frightening,
hilarious, outrageous, touching, and (as is always with
Jodorowsky’s work) filled with a deep core of mystic truth."
—John Zorn
"Where the Bird Sings Best is Alejandro Jodorowsky's brilliant, mad
and unpredictable semi-autobiographical novel. Translated by Alfred
MacAdam, this multigenerational chronicle introduces a host of
memorable characters, from a dwarf prostitute and a floating
ghost-Rabbi to a lion tamer who eats raw meat and teaches his
beasts to jump through flaming hoops. Fantastical elements aside,
Where the Bird Sings Best is a fiercely original immigration tale
that culminates in the author's birth in Chile in 1929 — a
complicated time in that nation's history. Combine that with
poetry, tarot and Jewish mysticism and you have a genius's surreal
vision brought to life.”
—NPR, Best Books of 2015
“Wildly inventive . . . Jodorowsky’s masterpiece swirls around
the reader, lurching from violent episode to mystical encounter to
cosmic sexual escapade as we follow our narrator’s grandparents’
journey from the old world to, refreshingly, South America. As the
drama unfolds, the reader’s response veers from incredulity to awe,
from doubt to delight. The momentum holds for the length of the
novel as a cavalcade of outsized characters careen across the page
in a frenzy that seems for once an adequate and just representation
of the living fury that is history . . . The images possess an
extreme yet striking beauty . . . In the case of Where the
Bird Sings Best, he has masterminded a success.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books
“This epic family saga, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One
Hundred Years of Solitude in structure and breadth, reads at a
breakneck pace. Though ostensibly a novelization of the author's
own family history, it is a raucous carnival of the surreal,
mystical, and grotesque . . . It weaves together Jewish
philosophy, passion, humor, Tarot, ballet, circuses, natural
disasters, spectacular suicides, lion tamers, knife throwers,
Catholic devotion, farmers, betrayals, prostitutes, leftist
politics, political violence, and the ghost of a wise rabbi who
follows the family from the Old World to the New.”
—Publishers Weekly
“First, a hard-boiled fact: No one alive today, anywhere, has been
able to demonstrate the sheer possibilities of artistic invention —
and in so many disciplines — as powerfully as Alejandro Jodorowsky
. . . His new semi-autobiographical novel Where the Bird Sings
Best, translated by Alfred MacAdam, is his magnum opus, a
fantastical something that in many ways mirrors the author himself:
It is brilliant, mad, unpredictable . . . It's not difficult
to see why Where the Bird Sings Best has been compared to Gabriel
García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. But Jodorowsky's
saga stands firmly on its own . . . Reading Jodorowsky is not
suspending reality; it is allowing yourself to believe that with
imagination, anything and everything is in the realm of possibility
. . . You can't be certain as to what exactly Jodorowsky is
channeling in Where the Bird Sings Best — but it doesn't feel like
it's native to our universe. Still, in this absurd and glorious
carnival, he is the only one worthy to be called the keeper or
tamer of anything.”
—Juan Vidal, NPR Books
“A sweeping tale of personal, philosophical, and political
struggles. It’s an immigrant’s story of Fellini-esque proportions .
. . For the self-proclaimed atheist mystic, the sacraments are
memory, dreams, family, wisdom, the grotesque, and the reinvention
of the self . . . Publisher Restless Books reminds us that
during Jodorowsky’s decades-long absence from cinema, he maintained
his status as a notable Latin American novelist . . . A
conduit and biographical key that further reveals his mesmerizing
process of imaginative self-fashioning.”
— Flavorwire
“In his ancestral adventures, Jodorowsky brings to life not just
the engaging story of his own family, but the mechanisms of
engagement underlying story itself. Each paragraph pulsates,
threatens to burst from its burgeoning body of details. Jodorowsky
relieves pressure as necessary. But time after time, he proceeds to
build up and dazzle all over again. One gets the sense when reading
that at no point did Jodorowsky ever come up with something and
save it for later. Each individual section is endowed with
Jodorowksy’s full vitality.”
— The Jewish Book Council
“I find myself impressed by his dilatory imagination, love of pure
spectacle, and puckish sense of humor . . . Sober, dressed,
and with all the lights on, I ripped through Where the Bird Sings
Best — the first of Jodorowsky’s many novels to appear in English
translation — in just a few enraptured days. The trick is to eschew
caricature and give yourself over to the experience, at which point
the wondrous strange takes over. The mind — and, god help me, the
spirit — finds itself traveling in realms it could not have
otherwise explored, or even dreamed exist . . . Where the Bird
Sings Best is electrifying.”
— Barnes & Noble Review
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