Novel
La tejedora de coronas
Not translated into English
Germán Espinosa · 1982
Synopsis
Genoveva Alcocer tells her life at the end of it. She saw Cartagena de Indias taken and held to ransom in 1697 by a French squadron and the buccaneers of Tortuga; she loved a young astronomer convinced he had discovered a planet, a discovery that could not be published since the Inquisition would have held it to be heresy. After his death, she sets herself the task of carrying to Europe what he was seeking. She passes through Ecuador, France, Prussia, Lapland, Spain, Italy and the Antilles, meets scholars and Voltaire, and returns.
Context
Written between September 1969 and April 1981, that is twelve years of work, published in 1982, and described by its author as the first book composed on a computer in Colombia. Its subject is the circulation of ideas between colonial America and Enlightenment Europe, starting from the French siege of Cartagena in 1697. The first edition was physically flawed, the pages coming loose and the type straining the eye, so that readers brought the book back; the second edition remedied this. The French title was suggested by the publisher's wife, to whom it recalled Flaubert's Carthaginian novel.
Who it is for
A long novel, translated into French, made of very long sentences with no chapters. It demands momentum; the first hundred pages decide.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the great Colombian historical novel and as the high point of its author's work.