Published in 1928 to great acclaim when Martín Adán was just twenty years old, The Cardboard House is sweeping, kaleidoscopic, and passionate. The novel presents a series of flashes―scenes, moods, dreams, weather―as the narrator wanders through Barranco (then an exclusive seaside resort outside Lima). In one stunning passage after another, he moves from reveries of first loves, South Pole explorations, and ocean tides to precise and unashamed notations of class and race: from a native woman “with her hard, shiny, damp head of hair―a mud carving”―to a gringo imbibing “synthetic milk, canned meat, hard liquor.” (One gringa particularly facinates him: “Let’s remember Miss Annie Doll, tourist and photographer, a spring dressed in a jersey that sprang out of this Peruvian resort town’s box of surprises…a red, long sinewy mobile thing that carries a Kodak over its shoulder and asks questions that are wise, useless, and nonsensical.")