Novel
Cruz de olvido
Not translated into English
Carlos Cortés · 1999
Synopsis
Martín Amador, a former Costa Rican journalist who spent some ten years in Nicaragua serving the revolution, is no more than an unemployed revolutionary when a phone call tells him that his son may be among the victims of the massacre at the Cross of Alajuelita, where seven young men were found mutilated. Back in San José, he investigates and runs up against his past, his guilt and his former fellow students, now journalists or men of power, among them the Proconsul, a corrupt politician.
Context
The novel was published in 1999 in Mexico City by Alfaguara, whose literary director, Sealtiel Alatriste, asked the author to shorten it, and that same year it won the Aquileo J. Echeverría national prize. Cortés, who calls it his Pandora's box, first meant to write a fable about power centred on a grotesque dictator; he turned it into a demolition of Costa Rican identity, which weaves into the investigation a real massacre, political corruption and the end of the Central American revolutions. Patrick Deville has translated extracts into French; the book has not been translated into English.
Who it is for
To follow a dark investigation in which a former revolutionary discovers, in his own city, the corruption and violence of power.
Prizes and reception
In 2003, the university journal Letras devoted a study to it that reads it as a cathartic historical novel.