# Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Lainez (Paperback)

**“\[_Bomarzo_\] is a novel that will make any reader happy.... \[A\] novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around.” —Roberto Bolaño  
  
A lavishly written gothic historical fantasy novel that centers around Pier Francesco Orsini, the tortured duke of Bomarzo and creator of the Italian town’s famously bizarre “Garden of the Monsters.”**  
  
Forty miles north of Rome, near the village of Bomarzo, Pier Francesco Orsini created a park of monstrous statuary in which the nightmares of the Renaissance stand preserved in stone. In _Bomarzo,_ Manuel Mujica Lainez—one of the major Argentine novelists of the twentieth century—re-creates this dark and legendary duke as a briliant memoirist. From beyond the grave, in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez's own Buenos Aires, Orsini—who now knows his Freud and has read _Lolita_—looks back at the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life.  
  
_Bomarzo_ is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of a hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain. It is also a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it is an immersive story told in a sumptuous style—like one of Poe's Italian tales rewritten by Proust—as Gregory Rabassa's translation beautifully conveys.

## Details

- **Price:** 24.5 GBP
- **Vendor:** New York Review of Books
- **Tags:** All Books, Fantasy

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 24.50 GBP | In stock |

## Images

- Bomarzo book cover

---

> Source: [Somiibooks](https://somiibooks.com/products/bomarzo-manuel-mujica-lainez-9781681379418)
> Updated: 2026-09-23