The interconnected stones that form Felipe Alfau’s novel LOCOS take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young ‘author’ For them , he complains, reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply love it and make for it against ray almost heroic opposition Alfau’s comedy of gestures – a mercurial dreamscape of the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo’s Cafe of the Crazy – was written in English and first published in 1936, favorably reviewed for The Nation by Mary McCarthy, as she recounts here in her Afterword, then long neglected.