About this ebook
The characters that inhabit these halls of the asylum are markedly interesting in their contorted psychologies, in their delusional systems, in the inventions of the imaginations that lead them somewhere that they do not remotely expect: the end of their shadows past the gray walls, the corridors they follow going nowhere through the center of the despair of their schizophrenias: the end of their delusions that do not provide with a way out.
The writer has gotten his material for the novel from his own experience as he walked these corridors, and the streets that appear in the narrative; and of course from the experience of mental illness. One more important aspect of the narrative: The narrator find himself in the streets of Miami Beach throughout the novel, from where he recollects the thirty years past when the remembrances from the sanatorium took place.
The world is going to end, like it happens in the end of every millennium, and a new imperator comes to MB to witnesses the executions of the insane.
About the author
Hector Valles, the author of Memoirs from the Sanatorium, lived for many years in Madrid and attended the graduate program on New York University in Spain. Later, he moved to New York where he graduated in 1983 from NYU, with a PhD in Spanish Literature. He then worked for several years as a teacher in schools in the inner city of New York as well as universities and a college preparatory school. His writings reflect his experience with the phenomenon of mental illness against the backdrop of the inner cities throughout the years. After moving to Miami in 1989 with his wife,, he completed a Master’s in Psychology. He has worked in Miami for more than a decade, as a psychotherapist with the chronic mentally ill. Hector Valles continues to write about the mentally ill. His oeuvre includes another novel, La fuga, the product of his experiences in San Juan during the nineteen sixties and the war. Twenty years transpire, however, after that, before Memorias del Sanatori is written In the meantime Hector Valles has authored two collections of short stories, and a book of poems. He has two works in progress at the moment: Hotel Continental, a novel, as well as Las aventuras de Pipe Valdivieso, a novelette. The author admits to a very slow creative process where a poem or story that was written several years ago might take a different twist and form itself with seventeen other poems into a book some twenty-seven years later. This type of creation lends itself to a brief oeuvre, however, perhaps of a high aesthetic caliber. Dr. Valles has presented his work in the Miami Book Fair, as well as in libraries through out Miami. His stories are also sold in Puerto Rican book stores. He was a finalist at the Adonai Prize of poetry when living in Spain.
