Recommendations
Books Like Los Sueños (The Dreams)
Books for readers who loved Quevedo's savage satirical dream-visions of Hell and Judgment
Francisco de Quevedo's Los Sueños are five dream-visions (written 1605–22) in which Quevedo encounters all of Spanish society's hypocrites in Hell, Purgatory, and at the Last Judgment — corrupt doctors, venal judges, vain noblewomen, fraudulent astrologers — in prose of violent conceptista wit. These eight books share that tradition of the satirical descent: dream-visions and visits to hell as a device for social satire, and the tradition of moral comedy that runs from Lucian through Swift and Voltaire.
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Buy on AmazonDialogues of the Dead
by Lucian of Samosata
The ancient Greek satirist whose Menippean dialogues in the underworld are the direct classical model for Quevedo's Sueños — characters from history meeting in the afterlife for comic deflation.
- 2
Buy on AmazonGulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
Swift is Quevedo's closest descendant in English — the same savage social satire, the same contempt for all human pretension, the same formal ingenuity in deploying an impossible premise to expose everyday madness.
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Buy on AmazonCandide
by Voltaire
Voltaire's philosophical tale is the French Enlightenment's equivalent of Quevedo's dark Baroque satire — the social world as a machinery of absurdity, all pretension punctured, all optimism defeated.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri
The great medieval predecessor of the dream-vision descent — Quevedo's Hell is a comic parody of Dantean moral geography, and the contrast between the two modes illuminates both.
- 5
Buy on AmazonInfernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
by Angela Carter
Carter's dark satirical novel uses the structure of a quest through impossible landscapes to anatomize male desire — a twentieth-century feminist Sueños.
- 6
Buy on AmazonInvisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
A narrator who descends through American society's hypocrisies in a structure that shares Quevedo's satirical journey through the social world's frauds — the American tradition of Menippean satire.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol
Chichikov's journey through provincial Russia buying dead serfs is a tour through a social world of comic pretension and moral fraudulence that shares Quevedo's satirical energy at a slower pace.
- 8Buy on Amazon
The Infernal Comedy
by John Malkovich
The theatrical monologue of a serial killer — but the tradition of the infernal as a frame for social critique runs from Quevedo through all of Western satirical performance.
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