Novel
Tierra mojada
Not translated into English
Manuel Zapata Olivella · 1947
Synopsis
In the rice paddies of the Sinú, on the Caribbean coast, peasants work land that does not belong to them. The river rises and falls, the harvests follow, the debts remain. The novel follows a family and its village, the working days, the evening gatherings, the ways of speaking and believing of people whom Colombian literature had not yet looked at closely, and it shows how the land passes little by little to those who do not cultivate it.
Context
First novel by its author, published in 1947 by a Bogotá publisher founded by a Spanish writer, while he was finishing his medical studies after three years spent on the roads of the continent. It opens the series of books he would devote to his own people. The prologue is by Ciro Alegría, whom he met in New York, who saw in it one of the first novelistic shoots of the continent's Black sensibility. A teacher character in it is taken from a brother of the author, a solitary writer.
Who it is for
A short novel, in a regional realist vein, with no French translation. The books its author will write afterwards are broader in scope.
Prizes and reception
The book appeared quietly and its recognition came from the later works, in the light of which it is read.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.