Denton Welch

At the age of twenty, the novelist Denton Welch suffered a cycling accident that left him partially paralyzed; the injuries that he sustained were to leave him in almost constant pain for the rest of his life, as well as bestowing upon him the spinal tuberculosis that would kill him at the age of 33. A Voice Trough a Cloud - increasingly regarded as Welchs masterpiece - is his account of this accident and the period of convalescence soon after. The unsparing chronicle of the world of a hospital patient - riddled with anger, boredom, almost unbearable stabs of pain and sharp flashes of humour - A Voice Trough a Cloud is, as John Updike wrote in The New Yorker, "An incomparable account of shattered flash and refracted spirit." His third and final novel, and written at a point when Welch could write for no more than a few minutes a day, A Voice Trough A Cloud is nonetheless possibly one of the most complete accounts of health and mortality; as Edmund White says, it is a book of "long slow dying", "through which all the worlds strangeness can be perceived."

First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure recounts a summer in the life of 15-year-old Orvil Pym, who is holidaying with his father and brothers in a Kentish hotel, with little to do but explore the countryside and surrounding area. I dont understand what to do, how to live: so says the 15-year-old Orvil - who, as a boy who glories and suffers in the agonies of adolescence, dissecting the teenage years with an acuity, stands as a clear (marvelously British) ancestor of The Catcher In The Ryes Holden Caulfield. A delicate coming-of-age novel, shot through with humour, In Youth Is Pleasure, has long achieved cult status, and earned admirers ranging from Alan Bennett to William Burroughs, Edith Sitwell to John Waters. Maybe there is no better novel in the world that is Denton Welchs In Youth Is Pleasure, wrote Waters. Just holding it my hands is enough to make illiteracy a worse crime than hunger.

En la juventud está el placer es una hermosa novela de formación que acompaña delicadamente a su protagonista, Orvil Pym, un quinceañero sensible y morboso, durante unos luminosos meses de verano. Como ocurre en toda la literatura de Denton Welch, importa el detalle de una mirada que toca las cosas y las personas, los sentimientos y los paisajes, con una prosa que abre las heridas e ilumina los abismos de la indefinición adolescente. En la juventud está el placer es quizá la mejor expresión de la obra de un autor casi secreto que inspiró la devoción de escritores de la talla de W.H. Auden, Edith Sitwell o William S. Burroughs. Convertida hoy, al cabo de más de medio siglo, en testamento de una sociedad que dejó de ser con el final de la segunda guerra mundial, En la juventud está el placer sale al encuentro de nuevos lectores y empieza a encontrar el lugar que le corresponde en el canon de los descarriados.

Las calles de Salisbury, el Londres antebellum, un trimestre en un internado, un transatlántico y su heterogénea población, la autista colonia británica de Shanghái o una cabeza humana en un camino chino son algunas de las coordenadas que configuran el mapa abigarrado de este viaje inaugural celebrado en 1931. Con el, Denton Welch rememora un año decisivo de la adolescencia, un cambio de rumbo que lo aparto de la senda prevista y lo llevo por otras calles hacia una nueva geografia estetica y sensible. Welch recuerda los dias en los que abrio los ojos y las manos para abrazar un mundo transfigurado por la sensibilidad artistica y por el deseo.

Editada de manera póstuma en 1950, Una voz a través de una nube –el título se refiere a su primera toma de conciencia después del accidente: «escuché una voz a través de una enorme nube de agonía y