Novel
La caída del águila
Not translated into English
Carlos Gagini · 1920
Opening lines
El firmamento, como gigantesco fanal de cristal azul colocado sobre el mar, comenzaba a palidecer hacia el levante y a teñirse de ese suave rosicler que recuerda las mejillas de una niña de quince abriles.
The firmament, like a gigantic bell jar of blue glass set over the sea, was beginning to pale towards the east and take on that soft rosy hue that recalls the cheeks of a girl of fifteen springs.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
In 1925, the United States Secretary of the Navy, Albert Adams, arrives at Sandpoint, the former Puntarenas, with his daughter Fanny and her fiancé. On Cocos Island, which they explore at Fanny's suggestion, they are captured by a secret society, the Knights of Liberty. The Costa Rican Roberto Mora leads it, with Central Americans, a Japanese, a German, a Mexican, a Filipino and a Colombian; with a submarine and flying machines, his fleet is to blockade the Panama Canal and bring down the American empire. Fanny and Roberto fall in love with each other.
Context
The novel appeared in 1920, or in 1921 from Trejos Hermanos according to the biographer Carlos Jinesta, and met with indifference, even hostility. Iván Molina sees in it a response to Washington's refusal to recognise the dictatorship of Federico Tinoco, to whom the author was related by marriage. With El árbol enfermo (1918) and a novel by Máximo Soto Hall published in 1899, it forms an anti-imperialist trilogy. Verónica Ríos Quesada produced an annotated edition of it in 2021, and Minor Herrera Valenciano studies in it the island utopia and the echo of the myth of Atlantis.
Who it is for
A speculative novel in Spanish; the annotated edition of 2021 illuminates its political and technical allusions.
Prizes and reception
A “rara avis” of Costa Rican narrative and, according to Iván Molina, one of the most original science fiction texts in Latin America of its time.
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