Where the Bird Sings Best
About this ebook
The magnum opus from Alejandro Jodorowsky—director of The Holy Mountain, star of Jodorowsky’s Dune, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, innovator behind classic comics The Incal and Metabarons, and legend of Latin American literature.
There has never been an artist like the polymathic Chilean director, author, and mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky. For eight decades, he has blazed new trails across a dazzling variety of creative fields. While his psychedelic, visionary films have been celebrated by the likes of John Lennon, Marina Abramovic, and Kanye West, his novels—praised throughout Latin America in the same breath as those of Gabriel García Márquez—have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Until now.
Where the Bird Sings Best tells the fantastic story of the Jodorowskys’ emigration from Ukraine to Chile amidst the political and cultural upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jodorowsky’s book transforms family history into heroic legend: incestuous beekeepers hide their crime with a living cloak of bees, a czar fakes his own death to live as a hermit amongst the animals, a devout grandfather confides only in the ghost of a wise rabbi, a transgender ballerina with a voracious sexual appetite holds a would-be saint in thrall. Kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, and erotic, Where the Bird Sings Best expands the classic immigration story to mythic proportions.
Praise
“This epic family saga, reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in structure and breadth, reads at a breakneck pace. Though ostensibly a novelization of the author's own family history, it is a raucous carnival of the surreal, mystical, and grotesque.”
—Publishers Weekly
"A man whose life has been defined by cosmic ambitions."
—The New York Times Magazine
"A great eccentric original....A legendary man of many trades.”
—Roger Ebert
For more information on Alejandro Jodorowsky, please visit www.restlessbooks.com/alejandro-jodorowsky
Ratings and reviews
About the author
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean-French filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, musician, comics writer, and spiritual guru, best known for his avant-garde films including Fando and Lis (1968), El Topo (1970)—which became a cult hit and inaugurated the “midnight movie” phenomenon—The Holy Mountain (1973), and Santa Sangre (1989). As is documented in the recent film Jodorowsky’s Dune, in 1975 he began to work on a colossal adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune—which was to star Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí and to be scored by Pink Floyd—but was never made (a later version was filmed by David Lynch). Recently, after 23 years away from the screen, Jodorowsky released his autobiographical film The Dance of Reality, about growing up in a Chilean mining town. Jodorowsky himself, his wife Valerie, and his sons Brontis, Axel, and Adan have all appeared in his films.
A circus clown and a puppeteer in his youth, Alejandro Jodorowsky left for Paris at the age of 23 to study mime with Marcel Marceau. He also befriended the surrealists Roland Topor and Fernando Arrabal, and in 1962 these three created the "Panic Movement" in homage to the mythical god Pan. He became a specialist in the art of the Tarot and prolific author of novels, poetry, short stories, essays, works on the Tarot and “psychomagic” healing, and over thirty successful comic books, working with such highly regarded comic book artists as Moebius and Bess. Restless Books will publish the first English translations of three of his best known books: Donde mejor canta un pájaro (Where the Bird Sings Best), El niño del jueves negro (The Son of Black Thursday), and Albina y los hombres perro (Albina and the Dog Men).
