The end has come for independent Catalonia, Barcelona has fallen, Bourbon army soldiers roam the streets, and defenders of the city face arrest. Barcelonan Marti Suviria is a conscientious rogue, an unwitting traitor, and a cowardly hero, the last pupil of the great French fortification theorist Sébastien de Vauban, a member of a unique brotherhood of military engineers, a future caustic memoirist, and for now, a wounded soldier who has lost everything — he flees Barcelona. However, he will not reach his destination immediately: for some people, seven versts is not a detour, so Suviria's journey from Catalonia to Vienna takes him through South Carolina (where he will participate in yet another war, brilliantly capture the city, find new love, and almost perish), and then through France (where his life will become even more interesting).
Moreover, ahead of him lies a grand revenge against a sworn enemy and a journey to the edge of the world...
Albert Sanchez Pinol is an anthropologist, one of the largest and most original stars of Catalan literature. His novel 'The Defeated', the first book about Marti Suviria, is an adventure novel, a military epic, and a high tragedy, which has sold over 250,000 copies in Spain, has been translated into 16 languages, and received the El Periódico newspaper award.
'Woe to the Defeated' is a dazzling continuation of 'The Defeated', a picaresque saga in the best traditions of 'Gil Blas', 'Simplicissimus', and 'The Adventures of the Brave Soldier Schweik', an epic tragic farce that encompasses all of European politics of the 18th century, and the story of the adventures of an unwilling adventurer, cynic, and wisecracker, who has lost his loved ones, home, and homeland, but has not lost the talent to laugh.
For the first time in Russian!