Essay
Páginas libres
Not translated into English
Manuel González Prada · 1894
Synopsis
Lectures, speeches and articles, arranged in five parts: the speeches of the Ateneo, of the Exhibition Palace and of the Olimpo theatre, and pages on Grau, Vigil, Victor Hugo, Renan, Castelar or the French Revolution. The defeat against Chile runs through the book, and the author uses it to put the Peru of his time on trial: the corruption of its leaders, the blindness of the clergy, the fate imposed on the Indians, the mediocrity of its literature, the liberals as much as the conservatives.
Context
The book was printed in Paris in 1894, by Paul Dupont, during the author's stay in Europe, in the personal spelling he had devised for himself and which later editions have kept, hence the form Pájinas libres. It earned him excommunication. The critic Alonso Rabí Do Carmo sees in the war the thread that unites these pages, which it haunts like a ghost; the author attacks the oligarchy as an elite foreign to its own country and attached to colonial practices.
Who it is for
Platform prose in Spanish, in the author's own spelling; each text can be read separately.
Prizes and reception
The first Peruvian writer to attack the oligarchy, its author left a mark on indigenismo and on the Peruvian left, from Mariátegui to Haya de la Torre.