Novel
Wolves' Dream
Sueño de lobos
Abdón Ubidia · 1986
Synopsis
In Quito, between 1979 and 1980, when the last military dictatorship gives way to democracy, Sergio, a bank clerk, stops sleeping on the day he turns thirty-four. Caught in a job he hates and a family that has become foreign to him, he conceives the plan of robbing the bank where he works and surrounds himself with four figures of nocturnal Quito, the Gavilán, the Turk Antonio, the Patojo and the Maestro, each with his own disappointments, whom an old moneylender, don Nacho, agrees to finance.
Context
The novel was published in Quito in 1986. It belongs to a cycle of three novels that follows the capital over three decades; after the city of the oil boom, it shows that of the apathy and disappointment of the eighties, and critics have read Quito as a character in its own right. In the chapters devoted to Sergio, the voice shifts from the first to the third person, sometimes within the same line. Mary E. Fieweger translated it into English under the title Wolves' Dream.
Who it is for
In Spanish, translated into English, not into French. The slowness of the opening is deliberate: the narrative sets up each of its characters before the action.
Prizes and reception
National José Mejía Lequerica Prize in 1986; hailed as the book of the decade and regarded as its author's masterpiece.
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