About FDU Press

Readers of this novel will enjoy its labyrinthine narrative more if he or she is acquainted with the characters that appear in it. Principle among these are two artists, Diego Velázquez and Salvador Dalí, the ghost of Dalí's elder brother, and to a lesser degree the poet Lorca. They are brought together within Rojas' story, set in an intense, feverish and in a sense surrealistic language. There are alternating episodes where on one hand Velázquez is recounting his rise within the hierarchy of Philip IV's court, and on the other Dalí's phantom brother haunts the dreams of the dying artist with memories of the past. Rojas is both a novelist and an academic (he has written books on both Lorca and Dalí, amongst several others), and his themes are art, biography and the (mythological) search for immortality. The latter element is suggested by the title, which refers to the Herculean labour where the legendary hero was required to win the golden apples of immortality from the nymphs' garden. In the modern fable that Rojas has concoted the artist is the hero, confronting his demons armed only with the tools of his trade as he searches from the Garden of the Hesperides. The result is a rich and rewarding novelistic experience.