"A delightful book that traces a historical biography of angst and the many philosophical, artistic, literary, and musical works it has inspired." El Mundo

"This book is a lengthy study of all those states of the soul that have been interpreted and healed differently in each era." La Vanguardia

★Negative emotions such as anxiety and depression in humans are not "21st century plagues": they are thousands of years old. Breaking old habits and combining multidisciplinary professional research, this book completely rewrites the history of today's most common depression.
★In this book, Spanish author Xavier Roca-Ferrer draws a rich emotional map, revealing the depression that has accompanied human history throughout history, tracing the philosophical, artistic and literary works it inspired.
★Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Michelangelo, Hugo, Rousseau, Freud, Heidegger... Countless sober souls all feel sadness and disgust for their lives. Melancholy has a history almost as long as the history of mankind. When the depression that has plagued us for centuries brings us pain, it also inspires endless creative desires, and many people have created outstanding works on the theme of "pain" in various fields. Using a linear structure, this book takes the reader through the history of depression, making this negative emotion less mysterious and elusive.
★At the same time, the book proposes the basic methods of dealing with depression in the history of people: in the Greco-Roman world, there are two of the most radical treatments for depression - suicide or laughing. Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Molière, Hume, or Voltaire, for example, dealt with it with humor, and they suggested "rire de tout", that is, laugh at everything.

What would become of Western culture if all the works inspired by melancholy disappeared?

A feeling has accompanied us throughout history and has greatly influenced our way of seeing the world, feeling it and interpreting it. The Greeks called it "melancholia," the Romantics "existential angst," and today's psychiatrists and psychologists often call it "anxiety."

Faced with this inescapable discomfort of living, some focus on immediate satisfaction, others accept it as a curse and a third group tries to seal a pact with their particular demon through art.

From medieval acedia to modern depression, passing through existentialism, nihilism, negative philosophy and the culture of suicide, The Anxious Monkey addresses the phenomenon of melancholy and anguish from the confluence of numerous disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, medicine, literature and the plastic arts. At the end of the investigation, we console ourselves with the thought that, without that "invisible worm" that Blake spoke of, perhaps we would never have recognized happiness.

Xavier Roca-Ferrer

Xavier Roca-Ferrer (Barcelona, 1949) is a writer, editor and translator. Among his numerous novels and collections of stories, El cas Petrescu, L' home dels miracles, Els dimonis familiars, Les raons de Venus or El cap de Penteu stand out, for which he received the Josep Pla award in 1993.

As a translator he has translated into Catalan and Spanish some masterpieces from German, French, English and Latin. He is a good connoisseur and admirer of classical Japanese and Chinese literature and the author of the first complete version in Spanish of Murasaki Shikibu's Novel of Genji.