Novel
Los perros no ladraron
Not translated into English
Carmen Naranjo · 1966
Synopsis
A nameless office worker, married and a father, lives out his condition as a bureaucrat in the San José of the sixties, and the book gives it almost entirely in dialogue. Around him, a tyrannical director, the secretary, colleagues, a dissatisfied wife, a young saleswoman who is his mistress; a demoted colleague, Quesada, dies under a truck, and the boss wants that death not to be linked to his treatment of him. An opening chapter has two voices of a novel yet to be written speak, one saying it has only this remedy for its ailment.
Context
Interviewed in 1985, the author says she wanted the least poetic book possible: an everyday language, trivial things, mediocre people, and almost nothing but dialogue, a kind of cinema in which the reader imagines the rooms and streets for himself. She drew her characters and situations from her work in social security, and the novel opens a trilogy on bureaucratic life. Published in 1966 by Editorial Costa Rica, it was reissued in 1974, then in 2012 by the distance-learning university's press.
Who it is for
A long novel in Spanish, made up of lines of dialogue without description, where the reader must sometimes guess who is speaking.
Prizes and reception
National Novel Prize in 1966; regarded as one of the author's major novels and as a pioneering work of the country's urban literature.
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