Novel
Los deshabitados
Not translated into English
Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz · 1959
Synopsis
In a city the book does not name, a few lives brush against one another without meeting. Father Justiniano, a priest whose faith wavers, sinks into his memories. Fernando Durcot, thirty-five, calls himself a writer and cannot manage to be one; María Bacaro, a nurse, is his companion. The sisters Teresa and Flor Pardo repeat days that are all alike, between a blind canary and an old dog named Muñoz. Two children, Pablo and Luisa, move through this world of adults who have lost the taste for living and carry on out of habit.
Context
The book was completed in the winter of 1957, in Santiago de Chile, where its author was living in exile with his parents, and appeared in January 1959: it is the only novel published in his lifetime, the next, Otra vez marzo, having been left unfinished. The city is never named in it, which breaks with the costumbrista and indigenista tradition of the Bolivian novel, and the narrative stays within the inner life of the characters. Juan Siles Guevara sees in it the moment when the country's fiction passes from action to psychological study, and Juan Rulfo regarded it as one of the best Latin American novels.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French translation. A book almost without plot, in which we pass from one consciousness to another, and in which one must accept that nothing happens.
Prizes and reception
Distinguished in 1962 by the William Faulkner Foundation, the only Bolivian work so selected, and counted among the fifteen fundamental novels of the country.
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