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DIARY OF A HUMILIATED MAN by Felix de Azua

DIARY OF A HUMILIATED MAN

by Felix de Azua

Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1996
ISBN: 1-57129-029-X

Diary Of A Humiliated Man ($15.95 paperback original; Oct. 1996; 282 pp.; 1-57129-029-X): This perversely amusing portrayal of an introverted, self-torturing soul—which won Spain's Premio Herralde Prize in 1987—introduces to American readers a wry psychological novelist who views his disturbed protagonist from a refreshingly offbeat perspective. De Azua's nameless diarist, a sardonic loner whose vividly described family and acquaintances influence him to test the limits of both acceptable and legal behavior, finds himself unequal to the challenges of criminality and even iconoclasm, and consequently dedicates himself to the pursuit of (what he feels he was born for) ``banality.'' He's a memorable inversion of the classic outsider: a hilariously inept Iberian counterpart of Dostoyevsky's ``underground man.''