Arabesco : Aventuras tangerinas de un coleccionista

A collector determined to safeguard nothing less than the spirit of the White City in his Tangier home, and a mischievous spirit embodying both the house and the city, are the protagonists of this tale of obsessions and misunderstandings, which is ultimately the story of a most singular love. Oblivious to his mounting debts, the collector pursues the chimeras of the past, gathering vestiges of a civilization that perhaps only flourished in dreams. Meanwhile, the goblin, more sensible and down-to-earth, demands that he tell his story, and thus this enchanting fable is woven, sinuous as an arabesque, made of scraps of different genres—from autobiography to noir, from scholarly essay to satire, from comic to popular song—inviting the reader to discover a Tangier with mythical overtones, that "old Carthaginian and Phoenician, Arab and Portuguese town," decadent refuge of so many Andalusian migrants since the fall of the Kingdom of Granada, where even murder is permissible if it is committed for "an aesthetic imperative, an urgent need," such as "to suppress a comma."