Institut Ramon LLull

In the year 1837, a young Prussian man — Catholic and Traditionalist— named Rudolf von Wielemann crosses the Pyrenees on a vague mission to gain military experience and aid the royalists in the First Carlist War, with a letter of introduction from his uncle and his father’s admonitions ringing in his head. However, when he arrives in Solsona to fight for Don Carlos’ cause, he finds it in ruins and instead of the perfect embodiment of order and tradition he had been sent from Berlin to bolster, he encounters almost the opposite: Solsona and its citizens are baffling and nigh incomprehensible.

By royal order, Wielemann is to stay there awaiting his next royal orders and the young Prussian is trapped in Solsona for more than a year, with much time for rumination on his role in that contradictory war and his disconcert at the constant culture shock. Nimbly juxtaposing the past and the present, Garrigasait, the author/narrator, brings to life all the mind-blowing absurdity of the Carlist period —whose growing pains birthed modern Spain— while brilliantly highlighting our own strangeness and pursuit of meaning in our strange existences.