Novel
Noche en vela
Not translated into English
Rima de Vallbona · 1968
Synopsis
In a funeral chamber, a family keeps vigil over the body of Aunt Leo, a hard and greedy woman who in public passed for a relative full of tenderness towards her nephews and nieces. Among indifferent cousins and visitors singing her praises, her niece Luisa relives through the night a childhood crushed by a code of obedience, the ill-treatment María suffered and the hatred she bears the dead woman; she wonders whether she is responsible for her death and whether she can forgive her.
Context
The author's first novel, the book was published in 1968 by Editorial Costa Rica in San José and that same year won the Aquileo J. Echeverría national prize for the novel, shared with Alfonso Chase. Reissued in 1976, 1982 and 1984, it moves back and forth between past and present as the narrator's memory wanders. Critics read it as an existentialist novel, turned towards the anguish of living and the mystery of death rather than towards social denunciation. It has been translated into neither French nor English.
Who it is for
For readers of family novels in which a single night is enough to bring back a whole childhood.
Prizes and reception
Jorge Chen Sham gives it a place in Radiografías del sujeto agónico (2001), a study devoted to guilt in her novels.