Novel
Itzam Na
Not translated into English
Arturo Arias · 1981
Synopsis
An assemblage of testimonies and written documents that expresses the social and political alienation of the bourgeois youth of Guatemala in the seventies; one critic read in it the search for salvation in drugs and in the old indigenous world. Neither its characters nor its action are known.
Context
The novel appeared in 1981 in Havana, from the Cuban institution that had awarded it a prize, two hundred and ninety-seven pages. Its author recounts that members of the jury, among them Eduardo Galeano and Claribel Alegría, had to defend a text that others, more cautious, judged too unruly. It was his second novel, written outside the country. A Spanish critic reviewed it as early as 1983 in the journal Ínsula.
Who it is for
In Spanish. The book is made up of voices and inserted pieces rather than a continuous narrative, and assumes familiarity with the preceding decade, that of urban repression.
Prizes and reception
Casa de las Américas Prize for the novel in 1981; critics place it among the texts of the new Central American fiction.