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Larga Sinfonía en D y Había una vezConcepto



Publishing
2022

In 2019, Larga Sinfonía en d had been out of print for fifty years. I recognized it as a novel the publishing world owed its readers and set out to bring it back. What started as a thesis became a digital archive, an editorial quest, an unexpected friendship, and eventually a second edition published by Penguin Random House Mexico in 2022.



During the second half of the sixties, a group of young writers in Mexico set out to write about their immediate surroundings in a way that was irreverent, playful, and utterly unashamed. In a moment of profound political complexity, their literature was countercultural and deeply political: it announced and shaped the student movement of 1968, and was one of the first signs of a transformation that would push Mexico into postmodernity. They wrote from youth and for youth, about identity, the body, love, eroticism, politics, religion, rock music, cinema, drugs, The Beatles and Bob Dylan, all of it in a language that was colloquial and untameable. These young writers were reluctantly called writers at all, and the phenomenon they created was dismissively baptized La Onda. Margarita Dalton was one of them.

Larga Sinfonía en d y había una vez was published for the first and only time in Mexico in 1968, through Editorial Diógenes, when Margarita was 25. Three thousand copies. A novel that broke with form and subject matter, testing the limits of the book, of morality, and of language itself. Martín, Roberto and Ana take acid in London, and the drug works as a catalyst for an altered state of consciousness from which the three friends dissect the reality around them, confront their individual and collective anxieties, and question their own identities. The goal is to unlearn: to shed imposed cultural assumptions, expose the failures of modernity, and reckon with the inadequacy of language in the face of material reality.

I first read the novel at university, while studying Literature in Mexico. It had been circulating clandestinely in photocopies and pirated links since its only publication, fifty years earlier. In 2019, as a student in the publishing master's program at Pompeu Fabra, I sent Margarita Dalton my first email: I declared myself a devoted groupie and asked her permission to propose the reedition as my thesis. That was the beginning of a virtual friendship and of the journey we would take together to bring the novel back into bookshops. In 2022, Penguin Random House Mexico published the second edition of Larga Sinfonía en d and brought us together in person for the first time, at the El Péndulo bookshop in Mexico City for its launch.




The publication was built on the digital archive I had created for my thesis — at that point, no digital version of the novel existed. Producing it meant working from a scanned copy of the 1968 original, reconstructing the text character by character. Penguin also kept the prologuist I had proposed: Iván Aguirre Darancou, researcher at the University of California and one of the most rigorous voices on Mexican counterculture and the Onda movement.

 Check out the original edition here.