Wrinkles

Paco Roca

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Paco Roca's Wrinkles is the story of Emilio, a retired bank executive who is interned in a nursing home after the effects of his Alzheimer's disease become too much for his son and daughter-in-law to bear. His diagnosis is hidden from him until a chance slip-up with medicines leads to a consultation with a staff doctor who makes clear to him the gravity of his affliction. With the help of his roommate, the roguish Miguel, he reads books and performs mental exercises to hold his dementia at bay; with time, though, the ravages of the disease make their irrevocable inroads...

translated from the Spanish by Adrian West



Paco Roca is an author and illustrator born in Valencia in 1969. He first worked as an illustrator for Kiss Comix in the early 1990s. His graphic novel Arrugas, excerpted here as Wrinkles, has won numerous prizes in Spain, including the National Comic Prize.  In 2011 a feature film based on the novel won the Goya Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Screenplay Adaptation.  Roca's most recent work, El invierno del dibujante, is an homage to a group of rebellious artists who struggled to found the groundbreaking magazine Tío Vivo, asserting themselves against the exploitation and censorship endemic in Franco's Spain.

Adrian West is a contributing editor at Asymptote. He has translated from German, Spanish, and Catalan for such publications as The Brooklyn Rail, Words without Borders, Fwriction, and Aldus, and his fiction has appeared in McSweeney's and 3:AM. He lives in Philadelphia with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.