First published in 1936, and considered one of the most groundbreaking
and significant novels written in Catalan, Waltz tells the tale of an
idle, introspective, and somewhat oblivious young man without qualities
as he stumbles through a milieu of civic upheaval and bourgeois tragedy,
waltzing from one prospective bride to another, never willing to
compromise his ideals, and so never quite becoming an adult. With one
foot in the romanticism of Goethe or Kleist, and another in the wildly
differing takes on the modern novel provided by Aldous Huxley, James
Joyce, and Marcel Proust, respectively, Waltz is an occasionally absurd
comedy of indecision and indolence structured in imitation of the dance
from which it takes its title.