Alberto Ruy-S?nchez - The Secret Gardens of Mogador

[shaunrandol]

Alberto Ruy-S?nchez's The Secret Gardens of Mogador explores the depths of sensuality found in the nurture of nature. In a modern take on the role of Scheherazade, the narrator of this erotic novella is charged with finding the gardens of a semi-mythical town and describing their intricacies each night to his lover, Hassiba. Can the narrator win her love with his amorous tales?


The Secret Gardens of Mogador
by Alberto Ruy-S?nchez
translated from the Spanish by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan
White Pine Press, 2009, 188 pp.


The Passionate Gardener

Going to bed each night with The Secret Gardens of Mogador is like going to bed each night with a lover. The pages of Alberto Ruy-Sanchez?s most recent book to be translated into English drip with sensuality, wooing the reader into a story and a land of subdued, carnal rapture. Not that each page carries a lurid lovemaking scene or portraits of nudity (though the cover and accompanying illustrations reveal a nude, statuesque beauty). Rather, the various tales within this novella portray eroticism as if it were a second language, or a sixth sense; eroticism is just an everyday part of living, like breathing.

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[Daniel del Real]

Unfortunately I haven't been able any fiction available from Ruy S?nchez. However I've read some of his essays and talked to him once or twice and I have to say he is a really interesting man with a certain charisma that make him very appealing to teenagers and young people. His talks are always fresh and unhibited yet he always find the stream to be clever and profound.
I must end up reading some of his novels sooner or later.