Short stories
Sangre de mestizos
Not translated into English
Augusto Céspedes · 1936
Synopsis
Eight stories of the Chaco conflict, which the author followed on the front line. War here is a struggle against the enemy and against a hostile nature, thirst and death; in "El pozo", written as a sergeant's diary, some twenty Bolivian sappers dig an ever deeper well in the desert for exhausted soldiers. The book denounces the absurdity of this war and the governments and foreign interests that wanted it.
Context
The collection appeared in 1936 in Santiago de Chile, from Nascimento, with a preface by Mariano Latorre, a year after the end of the war. Together with the books of Óscar Cerruto and Augusto Guzmán it founded the literature of the Chaco, and "El pozo" is regarded as one of the finest Bolivian short stories. The author's dispatches would be collected in 1975 in Crónicas heroicas de una guerra estúpida. "El pozo" was translated into French by Martine Couderc as Le Puits, published by L'Atelier du Gué in 1993, and into English as The Well; the whole collection has not been translated.
Who it is for
To understand, at a soldier's height, the war that set Bolivia against Paraguay from 1932 to 1935.
Prizes and reception
René Zavaleta Mercado compares the author to Faulkner; as early as 1936, the Chilean review Atenea saw in it a realism that surpasses Barbusse.