Novel
The Nine Guardians
Balún Canán
Rosario Castellanos · 1957
Synopsis
Comitán, in Chiapas, in the thirties, when President Cárdenas orders agrarian reform. A seven-year-old girl, whose name is not given, daughter of the landowner César Argüello, tells what she sees “at her height”: the house, her Indian nurse, her little brother Mario, the Indians who bring the provisions and leave again at the distance they are told to keep. The narrative then shifts to the third person, on the estate where the masters confront the new law, before returning to the child's voice.
Context
The author began the book in 1955, after a conversation with Emilio Carballido, to whom she dedicated it, and finished it in ten months with a Rockefeller grant. It was published in 1957 by the Fondo de Cultura Económica, in Mexico City, and received the Chiapas Prize in 1958. The title is the Maya name of the Comitán region, the “nine guardians” or “nine stars”. It opens a Chiapas trilogy, completed by a collection of short stories and a second novel. It was translated into French in 1962 by Gallimard.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred pages, told from a child's point of view, in which a central section changes voice; translated into French and English.
Prizes and reception
Its author's first novel, winner of the Chiapas Prize in 1958, often regarded as her best and as one of Mexico's great indigenist novels.
Sources for this page 12
The pages consulted to check this page.