An Infinite Sadness
Antonio Xerxenesky author Daniel Hahn translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Charco Press
Publishing:21st Oct '25
£11.99
This title is due to be published on 21st October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
In a small village in the Swiss Alps, in the aftermath of World War II, particle physics and psychiatry grapple with a forever changed world.
Nicholas walks the wooded path between the sanitarium where he works and his home, alert to a possible menace lurking in the trees, haunted by the possibility of an evil just out of sight. His days are spent ministering to minds that have been grievously damaged by the years of brutal conflict, violence suffered and violence abetted. The patients have different stories, but none of them have left the war behind. Anna, his wife, looks for meaning among the scientists she works with, exploring the dark matter that orders the universe. Failures of nerve and intrusions from the past dog them both, and neither is able to fully inhabit the present, that moment that is also—to Einstein, and in Jewish tradition—eternity. An infinite sadness, Xerxenesky offers, may be “the size of the universe or of the empty space inside an atom” and no certainty can defeat it, no reckoning be sufficient.
"The interplay between tension and distension, Eros and Thanatos, Jekyll and Hyde, present in his previous books, reaches his most sophisticated point: Xerxenesky measures the antidote as he administers the poison, building a subtle passage between one and the other, where the smallest dose can be fatal." —Estadão
"Profound, humane, and intellectually brave, Xerxenesky’s English-language debut questions everything: morals, rationality, historical guilt, and whether we can ever outrun our own pervading sadness. A true marvel." —Mark Haber , author of LESSER RUINS
"A mesmerizing novel, about the nature of evil, the sirens singing to us at sea, and that mysterious, shimmering light calling us forth to live." —Lila Azam Zanganeh , author of THE ENCHANTER
"His densest, most harrowing work yet, a novel of ideas as limpid and frosty as the Swiss Alps that frame it." —Daniel Galera , author of TWENTY AFTER MIDNIGHT
"A novel that puts us in a state of being on the brink: of faith, of love, and self-discovery." —Noemi Jaffe , author of WHAT ARE THE BLIND MEN DREAMING?
"By what marvel has Antônio Xerxenesky managed to draw us into such an abundance of fundamental ideas, in the form of a thriller with human psychology at its centre?" —Espaces Latinos
"Like all good novels, An Infinite Sadness provokes more than it brings answers, and stays alive in the mind of the reader." —Escotilha
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Praise for Antonio Xerxenesky
- Winner of the São Paulo Prize for Literature 2022.
- Shortlisted for the Candango Prize.
- Longlisted for the Jabuti Prize. <
ISBN: 9781917260121
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages