Novel
El día señalado
Not translated into English
Manuel Mejía Vallejo · 1964
Synopsis
A stranger arrives in Tambo, a village in the Andes, with a fighting cock named Aguilán. He has come to find the man who fathered him and then abandoned him with his mother twenty-five years earlier: the Lame Chútez, who rules the village with his henchmen. At the same time a new priest arrives, and Sergeant Mataya prepares an operation against the guerrillas of the páramo. The festivities are approaching, and with them the fight in which the stranger will enter his cock against the village's.
Context
Awarded a prize in Barcelona in 1963 and published there the following year, at the moment when the Latin American novel was beginning to be exported. The book is made of four short stories written between 1956 and 1960, reworked as prologues and sewn to a new narrative, so that it advances on two threads: the village seen by a priest and the village seen by the outsider, that of the troops and the guerrillas on one side, that of the cockfighting pit on the other. The cockfights stand for the civil war, and a volcano smokes in the background. The following year, a short story taking up the same subject was awarded a prize by a Paris magazine.
Who it is for
A novel in three parts, with no French translation. The language is simple; the construction in two voices demands a little attention at the start.
Prizes and reception
Nadal Prize in 1963, the book that made its author known outside Colombia, and one of the novels of the Violence that critics single out.