The Secret Crypt
Originally published in 1968, The Secret Crypt is something of a cult classic in Mexican literature.
Elizondo’s impassioned, breathless prose launches the reader into a labyrinth that is also a hall of mirrors. Here, we find a small group of characters who are part of an underground sect called Urkreis, one of whose aims is to discover the identity of the sect’s founder, known only as “the Imagined.” The identities of narrator, author, and characters blur into one another as the narrative moves between the two worlds of the novel and the author writing the novel—an unclassifiable masterpiece containing initiation rites, sacrificial murder, conspiracy, and delirium.
Salvador Elizondo was a Mexican experimental novelist, poet, and critic. His works include Farabeuf, or the Chronicle of an Instant (1965), The Secret Crypt (1968), The Graphographer (1972), Elsinore: A Notebook (1988), and Theory of Hell (1993). He won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 1965 for his first novel, Farabeuf o la crónica de un instante, and was awarded the Mexican National Prize for Letters in 1990.
Joshua Pollock is a poet and translator. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
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