F. Martínez Dalmases

The Legacy

Original title:

El legado. Crónica de las tierras del exilio

About the book:

The Legacy

In this lucid and transparent work, created out of different stories threaded together like glass beads, Martinez Dalmases recovers the rich Oriental story-telling tradition and inserts this into a Western framework of unusual freshness.  He opens new dimensions for the reader that are not normally available in a society mechanically organised and propagated.

Here, as in Gharbm where the tales are intended inexorably to inculcate moral lessons and superficial ethics, if not for entertaining children, there still remain some readers who know that stories are an unsurpassed vehicle for describing, and feeding, the deepest yearnings of humankind.

Often, like the orphans of memory that we have become, the characters in the book seek in their stories the materialisation of their most intimate aspirations. Their strength issues from our deficiencies, from our desire to transform ourselves into whole being, endowed with knowledge, fluidity and the ability to attain a destiny beyond our ordinary limits.

The scenario of this book is unpredictable, generous, at times cruel, and always fertile. The characters have to invent themselves, believe in their own stories, to be able to see their most genuine yearnings fulfilled. And the same applies to the reader!  None of what we have or hold to be true at the beginning of the quest is important, since the quest itself will lead us along unsuspected paths and will obliterate our footprints. And since the path that takes us to transformation is always different, the stories acquire a new aspect every time we come across them, since those who tell them and those who listen to them together breathe life into them which is ever new, and never repeated.

About the author:

F. Martínez Dalmasses was born in Lleida (Catalonia, Spain) in 1955. He has translated a large part of Idries Shah's work, and has also contributed articles on history, sociology and psychology to a number of magazines.