Jaime Saenz is one of the most complex and interesting writers of modern Bolivia. Irrational and oblivious to the construction of clear and well-defined meanings, his work occupies an exceptional place in Bolivian literature. Like few other authors, his narrative flows from a personal poetic universe that cannot be considered separately from the writer's eccentric life. Made of syntactic twists, paradoxes, and tautologies, Saenz's poetry is connected to his fiction, particularly to Felipe Delgado (1979), a novel of the modern grotesque.

Born in La Paz, Bolivia, on 8 October 1921, Saenz devoted his life to the exploration of the dark, gloomy side of the city. His penchant for the study of a magical underworld inhabited by drunken freeloaders led him to a unique, mystic search of the human spirit while at the same time suppressing the real, objective world. Saenz's total submersion in the study of the cadaverous and his frequent...