Cid Cabido

Biography

Cid Cabido is known for his writing that combines a strict realism with a strong sense of the absurd. His most famous novels are Bakery (1994) and Abelian Group (1999), both of which won the prestigious Blanco Amor Prize for novels. Abelian Group has been translated into Spanish and published by Alianza Editorial. More recently he has published the novels Bloomsday (2006) and A Story I Am Not Going to Tell (2009). His book of short stories Numbered Days (1991) won the City of Lugo Prize. He is also the author of a play, Copenhagen (1993), in collaboration with Andrés A. Vila, which won the Álvaro Cunqueiro Prize. A much respected author and student of economics and philology, he has been active in left-wing, pro-independence politics in Galicia.

Synopsis

Abelian Group (152 pages) is Cid Cabido’s third novel and relates the activities of a group of six or seven friends over a period of a week. The story is narrated by one of the members of the group in the first person. An “Abelian group” is a group whose members are commutative, that is the result of applying a group operation to two members of the group does not depend on the order in which they are written.

Sample

We requested an audience with the governor and he gave us one. We hadn’t come armed, so it wasn’t very difficult to get through the checkpoints in the lobby, and on the second floor, or even outside the door of his office, a sizable room with ceilings twelve feet high at least, by my calculations. The doors and tables were made of a dark and ancient wood, a little the worse for wear, and in the remaining furniture, the clots of black varnish really stood out.

We sat ourselves down in front of his desk, in a semicircle with a variable radius, filling his field of vision. An armed guard was stationed outside his door; of this we were certain. It’s possible one of us had been recognized, the guy from good stock, as they say, which we were counting on as our letter of introduction. The governor was pushing fifty, but in any case, the push was a soft one, and it was clear he still savored the perks of his post, as well as the prestige and status that went along with it.