Novel
Cubagua
Enrique Bernardo Núñez · 1931
Synopsis
In the Venezuela of 1925, Leiziaga sets out in search of "the secret of the land". The narrative proceeds by leaps in time: from the present it goes back to the days of discovery and conquest, then to a primordial mythical time, after Leiziaga has drunk a mysterious potion from the Atabapo. Near him, Doctor Tiberio Mendoza, a positivist historian, mocks his writings, which he entitles "The Ghosts of Cubagua".
Context
Conceived at the end of 1925 on Margarita Island and written from 1928 to 1930, the novel was published in Paris in 1931 by Le Livre libre, in a small print run, and at first went almost unnoticed. Its cyclical time and indigenous perspective reread the conquest in the light of the neocolonialism of the oil era; through its treatment of time, history and myth it heralds the novels of the Latin American boom. Rowena Hill has translated it into English; the book has not been translated into French.
Who it is for
To discover a little-known forerunner of the modern Latin American novel, in which the history of the conquest merges with myth.
Prizes and reception
Recognised from the second half of the twentieth century, it is regarded as the country's foremost avant-garde novel; Alejandro Bruzual calls it almost prophetic.