Even so, this tour de force reads like a message from humanity's collective unconscious. The narrative, which is translated brilliantly here, has a surprise ending, leapfrogging into the present, but one wishes that Rebolledo had given more play to the fantasy element and less to the historical gossip and raunchiness. Expelled from France by Robespierre, whom Rasero berates for his fanaticism, the clairvoyant escapes to Spain, where he links up with Goya-whose macabre canvases, like Rasero's visions, seem to prefigure our century of horrors. Rasero's affair with Mexican-born Creole actress Mariana Rodgriguez, widow of the viceroy of Mexico, teaches him the meaning of love and temporarily halts his nightmarish visions. During the years the novel chronicles (primarily, 1749-1812), he befriends the famous and infamous, including Voltaire, encyclopedist Denis Diderot, Madame Pompadour, chemist Antoine Lavoisier, Mozart (as a child prodigy), painter Fran ois Boucher and French revolutionaries Danton and Robespierre. Bald since birth, mute until age six, Rasero is perplexed and deeply disturbed by his glimpses of the bombing of Hiroshima, Nazi concentration camps, the slaughter of WWII and Vietnam. Minor Spanish diplomat Fausto Rasero, who leaves Madrid for Paris in 1740 at age 16, has a unique paranormal gift: each time he reaches orgasm with one of his many elegant lovers, he is granted a clairvoyant-and usually horrifying-vision of the future.

In his prodigious first novel, Francisco Rebolledo brings to life a heady mix of eighteenth-century politics, desire, philosophy, science, and art, showing us in this vanished world, with all its contradictions and sorrows, a troubled counterpart to our own.Winner of the Mobil Corporation's Pegasus Prize for Literature, Mexican writer Rebolledo's debut is at once a rich historical novel and a racy tale of manners and ideas with a strong element of apocalyptic fantasy. We also share information about the use of the site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Educalingo cookies are used to personalize ads and get web traffic statistics. Synonyms for rasero and translation of rasero to 25 languages. But it is his love for a beautiful young widow from Mexico that transforms him and ultimately moves Rasero toward the wisdom he has long sought. Meaning of rasero in the Spanish dictionary with examples of use. As he tries to reconcile the sanguine promises of the Enlightenment with the chilling prophecies of his visions, he comes to know virtually every important figure of his time: Diderot, Voltaire, Madame de Pompadour, Boucher, Lavoisier, the young Mozart, Hume, Rousseau, Robespierre, and Goya. He is also orgasmically clairvoyant, given at the moment of carnal release to apocalyptic visions of a world that he comes to recognize as the future. He is a peculiar hero-bald since birth, intellectually and sexually precocious as a child, as a man passionate and warmhearted. Fausto Rasero, a young Spanish nobleman, settles in Paris, the hub of European intellectual life in the eighteenth century.

Rasero by Francisco Rebolledo