Novel
Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda
Not translated into English
Jorge Enrique Adoum · 1976
Synopsis
A writer is writing a book about his left-wing friends, in Quito, in the sixties. At its centre is Galo Gálvez, a paralysed intellectual whom the Communist Party keeps at a distance and whose life together with Margamaría, a party comrade and childhood friend, is coming apart; around him, the narrator's affair with Rosana, married to a landowner whom the book calls the Crétin, and Indian peasants fighting over water. The writer intervenes in his own narrative, corrects his characters and lets the making show as it goes along.
Context
The book was published in Mexico City in 1976, by Siglo XXI, with the subtitle of a text with characters, during its author's exile. Galo Gálvez is modelled on the writer Joaquín Gallegos Lara, and the title expresses, according to Adoum, the two sides of the concerns of his time, the collective and the intimate; the narrative proceeds by collage of quotations, press cuttings and registers of language. Françoise Campo-Timal translated it into French in 1985, and Camilo Luzuriaga made a film from it in 1996 in which the author becomes a character.
Who it is for
In Spanish; a French translation exists. A demanding read: a collage of quotations and registers, invented words, free punctuation, and an order of narration never given in advance.
Prizes and reception
Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in Mexico, awarded for the first time to a foreigner; regarded as one of the most remarkable examples of the new Latin American novel.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.