Novel
Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City
Bruna, soroche y los tíos
Alicia Yánez Cossío · 1973
Synopsis
A town in the Andes kept asleep by devotion and soroche, altitude sickness. Bruna Catovil grows up there among eccentric uncles and aunts: Aunt Catalina, Jerónimo who raises frogs, Carmela, married and widowed on the same day. Tracing her family's history back to María Illacatu, the Indian ancestor whose name the family erased, she gauges the inertia in which her family has settled, and decides not to lie down in it in her turn.
Context
The book grew out of a set of short stories written over five years, which its author joined into a continuous narrative. Submitted under the title La ciudad dormida to the first book biennial of the Casa de la Cultura, in 1965, it won nothing: the competition was declared without a winner. Revised, it was submitted in 1971, under the male pseudonym El Pajar Pintado, to the competition organised by the Guayaquil newspaper for its fiftieth anniversary, and was published in 1973. Competitors then accused the author of having plagiarised García Márquez. Kenneth Wishnia translated it into English in 1999.
Who it is for
In Spanish, translated into English, not into French. It is worth knowing that the soroche, the malaise of altitude, stands here for the numbness of a city.
Prizes and reception
First prize in El Universo's novel competition in 1971, with a jury of Carrión and Rojas; Michael Handelsman saw it as the most important novel written by an Ecuadorian woman.
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