The Pornographer Prudishness

Sheltered in an apartment, a pornographer replies to letters from women and men, guiding them through a labyrinth of vertigo and lust. This all-consuming task leaves him emotionally drained. He only has one relief: watching his beloved Ursula from his balcony. But Ursula decides to change the rules of their voyeuristic relationship. No longer visual, it must now be epistolary. For the first time, the pornographer receives love letters and his life becomes writing to Ursula and reading her replies. Little by little, his old life ends and he starts to glimpse the beginning of an unexpected future. A mysterious messenger delivers them and brings them with a growing urgency. Time becomes measured by the reading her letters and writing to Ursula. In his ivory tower of desire, the pornographer discovers that his old life is running out, and the life to come is still indistinct. A tortuous happiness is within reach, but still evades him. Does he long for a meeting with his loved-one or just her letters? Who is the masked messenger and what is his relationship to the lady? Meanwhile, he is paralysed by doubt, while a new reality, perhaps this time the definitive one, approaches.

El pudor del pornógrafo is a superb novel about the paradoxes and obsessions that fire love. It is the story of an imagined relationship and an authentic passion. Thirty years after its publication and accompanied by previously unpublished postscript written by the author for this edition, Alan Pauls’s first book is a coded map, and not always coded, of the style and subjects that would mark his future literary career

«Alan Pauls is one of the best Latin American writers alive. That is a secret that only a few of us enjoy knowing» (Roberto Bolaño).

«How could you fail to enjoy a text that contemplates our condition with such detail, and with such intrigue and incident» (Luis Chitarroni).