Novel
¡Hijo de opa!
Not translated into English
Gaby Vallejo · 1977
Synopsis
The novel follows the disintegration of the Cartagena family, landowners in Cochabamba, from the fifties to the seventies. A racist crime, the murder of an indigenous woman, mother of the mestizo child Martín, leaves a lasting mark on the family. Around Juan José Cartagena, whose childhood is spent in Tarata before the revolution of 1952 and the agrarian reform, the book sets a violent patriarchal world against a female universe of silences and frustrations.
Context
The novel appeared in 1977 and won the Erich Guttentag National Novel Prize; it has since gone through several reissues, four of them with Los Amigos del Libro, and a seventh edition appeared in 2023. Paolo Agazzi adapted it for the cinema in the mid-eighties as Los hermanos Cartagena. The author says she blended childhood memories and imagination in it, and names Vargas Llosa and Victor Hugo as models. No French translation is known; the Bolivian press reports an English translation by Alice Weldon.
Who it is for
To see, through the decline of a landed clan, what the national revolution changed in the Bolivian countryside.
Prizes and reception
The critic Willy Oscar Muñoz studies it in an essay devoted to Gaby Vallejo's protesting, socially engaged fiction.