Novel
Felipe Delgado
Not translated into English
Jaime Sáenz · 1979
Synopsis
Felipe Delgado, whose mother died on the day of his birth, loses his father at the threshold of the book. He then makes a world of his own in alcohol: Corsino Ordóñez's bodega, where a medium practises necromancy and where people come, glass in hand, to look death in the face. There he mixes with the aparapitas, those porters of the markets, the customs houses and the railway, in whom he seeks a knowledge of life. He would also like to fulfil himself as an artist and find his place in the order of his country. Then he falls in love with Ramona Escalera, who bears his mother's name.
Context
The novel appears in 1979 in La Paz, from Difusión. It is made up of four parts and is set in the city of the 1930s, that of the generation returning from the Chaco. Luis H. Antezana has studied the relationship between Felipe and his narrator, and the figure of the aparapita, whom the author called a born anarchist, has since prompted a critical reading that sees in it a romantic, even racialising, gaze; Mauricio Souza speaks of a purple aesthetic. A theatre company has brought it to the stage.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French translation. Long, slow, in a dense and fragmented prose, and full of words from La Paz, aparapita, bodega, which no note explains.
Prizes and reception
Perhaps its author's best-known book, and the second of the fifteen fundamental novels selected in 2011 for a state edition.
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