Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach's Goldberg Variations, Luis Sagasti's second book to appear in English takes the guise of a musical scheherazade, recounting story after story, vibrating to celestial harmonies. From the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands, A Musical Offering traverses the shifting sands of fiction and history.

How do we even begin to narrate the history of the world? Where do we start, and where do we end? Fireflies is Sagasti's bold and original attempt to answer these questions. Roaming across time and geography, he lights on an eclectic array of characters and events that at first glance seem unrelated, and teases out their stories to reveal unexpected points of contact between them. Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Beuys, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Neil Armstrong, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Beatles, Japanese poets, Brazilian priests, Russian cosmonauts and many more cross these pages, and Sagasti finds common threads that weave them together into a single narrative.The fireflies themselves perhaps provide the key to understanding this book. They become a metaphor for the resistance of certain luminous moments, certain twinkling fragments of history, to the passing of time. They remind us that events do not always simply disappear neatly into the darkness, but rather remain, floating in the air, lighting up the night sky indefinitely. Sagasti shows us that the present moment, like this novel, is a tapestry woven of a multiplicity of times.Using his unique, poetic and keenly observant style, Sagasti transforms the accidents of history into a single, lyrical constellation, and for the reader it is an extraordinary sight.

El segundo libro traducido al ingles de Luis Sagasti emprende un recorrido circular que hace eco de las _Variaciones Goldberg _de Bach para narrarnos historia tras historia, al estilo de Scheherazade, entretejidas de manera sutil y sorprendente, creando un tapiz que vibra al son de armonias celestiales. Sagasti nos guia en un viaje que va desde la musica nacida bajo el sol a la musica enviada al espacio en la mision Voyager. Desde Rothko hasta el rock, desde aquellos compositores en los campos de concentracion hasta una habitacion donde se escuchan los lamentos de los reclutas argentinos en Malvinas. Un delicado homenaje a la narracion, la infancia y el poder transformador de la musica. _The Spanish language edition of A Musical Offering. Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach's Goldberg Variations, Luis Sagasti's second book to appear in English takes the guise of a musical scheherazade, recounting story after story, vibrating to celestial harmonies. From the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands, A Musical Offering traverses the shifting sands of fiction and history. _ Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach's Goldberg Variations, Luis Sagasti's second book to appear in English takes the guise of a musical scheherazade, recounting story after story, vibrating to celestial harmonies. From the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands, A Musical Offering traverses the shifting sands of fiction and history.