Novel
Río Fugitivo
Not translated into English
Edmundo Paz Soldán · 1998
Synopsis
In Cochabamba, a class of boys enters its final year at Don Bosco, a private Catholic school to which the sons of well-off families are sent. Alcohol, first drugs, first girls, indiscipline. Roby narrates, the class's official chronicler and apprentice writer, author of detective stories that pass from hand to hand, in which a detective, Mario Martínez, investigates in an invented city that resembles his own. At home, a father who is an architect with stalled projects, a mother who works in advertising, a sister, a younger brother. Then a death in his circle poses an enigma to him.
Context
The novel was published in 1998 by Alfaguara, and its author produced a revised edition in Cochabamba in 2008, the year Libros del Asteroide published it for the first time in Spain, with a preface by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. It combines the novel of formation, the detective riddle and the political novel of a country in crisis; Roby's stories openly rewrite his favourite authors in the genre. The invented city of his investigations, a double of Cochabamba, recurs in several of the writer's books.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French translation. Over three hundred and fifty pages, the speech of adolescents from Cochabamba, and a constant play with the detective novel, which it is better to know a little.
Prizes and reception
A finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, it is the book that established its author among the voices of the new Latin American literature.
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