When I think of My Missing Head

Adolfo Couve

Translated by Jessica Sequeira

Camondo, a painter, wakes up one morning in his studio with his head missing, it having been yanked from his body the night before by Marieta, a model. This is a punishment from the gods, who have already taken away his artistic talent. Now, mysteriously resurrected but not quite intact, Camondo wanders about a seaside town wearing a Franciscan habit stolen from church in an attempt to disguise himself.

Published posthumously, When I Think of My Missing Head, by the Chilean painter and novelist Adolfo Couve, here translated for the first time into English by Jessica Sequeira, is a phantasmagorical literary experiment, an existential puzzle with pieces that fit together by secret logic. With tones that are gothic and surrealist, symbolist and magical, this is a highly original work of terror and fantasia.

About the Author

Adolfo Couve (Valparaíso, Chile, 1940 – Cartagena, Chile, 1998) trained to be a painter at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Chile, following this with studies at the Art Students League in New York and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He taught aesthetics and art history at the University of Chile for over thirty years. Already a successful painter, he embarked on a literary career characterized by long periods of silence and the search for perfection. Beginning in 1965, the publication of his first book, he went back and forth from painting to literature. His work includes the novels Alamiro (1965), En los desórdenes de junio (1968), El picadero (1974), La lección de pintura (1979), El pasaje / La copia de yeso (1989), Balneario (1993), La comedia del arte (1995) and Cuarteto de la infancia (1996).

About the Translator
Jessica Sequeira was born in San Jose, California in 1989, and currently lives in Santiago de Chile. Her works include the novel A Furious Oyster (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and the collection of essays Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age (Zero).

Her translations include Bernardo Couto Castillo’ s Asphodels (Snuggly Books, 2020), Teresa Wilms Montt’ s Sentimental Doubts (Snuggly Books, 2020), Teresa Wilms Montt’ s In the Stillness of Marble (Snuggly Books, 2019), Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s Sentimental Stories (Snuggly Books, 2019), Rafaela Contreras’ s The Turquoise Ring and Other Stories (Snuggly Books, 2019), and Liliana Colanzi’ s Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive).

Paperback, 104 pages. Release date: September 10, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-94381-374-2
Price: US$13.50