Novel
Entre la piedra y la cruz
Not translated into English
Mario Monteforte Toledo · 1948
Synopsis
Entre la piedra y la cruz (Between the Stone and the Cross): Pedro Matzar, a Tz'utujil Indian from San Pedro La Laguna, on the shore of Lake Atitlán, grows up beside a father who wants to pass on to him the love of the land and of maize. Torn between the custom of the ancestors and the attraction of the Ladino world, he studies thanks to local notables and becomes a schoolteacher, while his attachment to Margarita, the daughter of the criollo family that protected him as a child, takes shape.
Context
The novel appeared in 1948 in Guatemala City, from El Libro de Guatemala. E. Coello Gutiérrez sees in it a book of the ideology of October 1944, which indicts the foreign presence and calls for the union of mestizos and Indians. A. Montepeque compares it to Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias. Michel Reboux translated it into French for Gallimard, in the La Croix du Sud series. The novel was reissued in 1997 and is included in the author's complete works from Piedra Santa.
Who it is for
For discovering the Guatemalan indigenist novel, between the Indians of Lake Atitlán and the Ladino world, readable in French.
Prizes and reception
For Arana Fuentes, this novel divides Guatemalan literature in two, by placing an Indian at the centre for the first time.
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