Novel
Death as a Way of Life
Muertes de perro
Francisco Ayala · 1958
Synopsis
In a nameless country of tropical America, in the middle of the twentieth century, the dictator Antón Bocanegra has been assassinated, and the reader knows it from the first pages. Luis Pinedo, a cripple, sets out to write the chronicle of the crime and its aftermath. He gathers the papers he finds: above all the memoirs of Tadeo Requena, the dictator's secretary and perhaps his natural son, whose rapid rise we follow, then ambassador's reports, letters, press articles, in which a regime eaten away by political and moral corruption is revealed.
Context
The novel appeared in 1958, when its author had been living in exile for nearly twenty years. As in Cervantes, the narrator claims to take his story from a found manuscript, and he composes the truth from conflicting documents and voices, which he arranges and comments on in his own way. It is classed among dictator novels, but the author and part of the critical tradition read in it first of all a picture of human degradation under absolute power, which refers obliquely to Spain in the civil war. A sequel, El fondo del vaso, appeared in 1962.
Who it is for
A novel made up of juxtaposed documents and testimonies; it is better to know that its author was writing from exile.
Prizes and reception
Translated into the main languages, into English as early as 1964 under the title Death as a Way of Life, then into French in 2000.
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