Novel
The Ship of Fools
La nave de los locos
Cristina Peri Rossi · 1984
Synopsis
Equis, an exile, goes constantly from city to city without managing to grasp the soul of any, though he calls himself a sedentary man. The narrative advances in fragments, with several narrators, and crosses paths with other wanderers: Morris, who lives on an island and writes a manual for getting lost in the city, Graciela and her suitcase, Lucía, dressed as a man, whose appearance disturbs Equis, and women who go to London to have abortions. In pieces comes back the description of the medieval Creation tapestry in Girona Cathedral.
Context
Published in Barcelona by Seix Barral in 1984, the novel is made up of fragments, circular meditations and motionless scenes, without a continuous plot; one meets in it a character who has passed through a camp of the disappeared. Critics read in it an allegory of exile and note in it violence against women, political persecution, the dehumanisation of cities and sexual otherness; a 2017 study analyses it through the psychiatric notion of the double bind. Psiche Hughes's English translation appeared in 1989.
Who it is for
A novel in Spanish of about two hundred pages, fragmentary and without a continuous plot, which calls for attentive reading.
Prizes and reception
Counted among her major works, it is held by the journal Confluencia to be the best Latin American novel of the post-boom.
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