Novel
El negrero: vida novelada de Pedro Blanco Fernández de Trava
Not translated into English
Lino Novás Calvo · 1933
Synopsis
The fictionalised life of Pedro Blanco Fernández de Trava, an Andalusian from Málaga who makes his fortune through the slave trade, smuggling and piracy. Established at the Gallinas, on the coast of present-day Sierra Leone, from 1822 to 1838, he supplies captives to Cuba with his Havana partner. Begun as a biography, the book gradually becomes a novel, and enters the world of slavery by showing the condition imposed on the slave.
Context
The book originated in a commission from Antonio Marichalar, at the Madrid publisher Espasa-Calpe, for a series of narratives; the author wrote it in Madrid and published it in 1933. The prologue to a 2015 anthology finds in it a fiction both agile and dense, sometimes recalling Faulkner or Hemingway; Marilyn Bobes regards it as a precursor of the Latin American boom. A second edition appeared in Buenos Aires in 1944, another in Havana in 1997; Jean-Pierre Paute translated it in 2011.
Who it is for
A documentary novel about the slave trade, in Spanish; a French translation has existed since 2011.
Prizes and reception
No prize. Biografías y Vidas gives it as the first and best-known of its author's novels.
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