Novel
1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile
1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla
Homero Aridjis · 1985
Synopsis
Castile, in the fifteenth century. Juan Cabezón, a descendant of converted Jews, searches for his lost love, Isabel de la Vega, through the towns and roads of a Spain where the Inquisition hunts down Jews and Moriscos. The narrative opens with the assault on the Jewish quarter of Seville in 1391 and follows the daily life of the time: autos-da-fé, processions of penitents, street scenes, hidden joys and public terrors, up to the year when Granada falls and the Jews are ordered to leave the kingdom.
Context
The novel appears in Mexico City in 1985 from Siglo XXI. It draws on sources contemporary with the events it recounts. Carlos Fuentes and American critics hail it; the English translation by Betty Ferber, published in New York in 1991, is among the New York Times's notable books of the year, and the Italian translation receives the Grinzane Cavour prize in 1992. It appears in French from Seuil in 1990.
Who it is for
A novel of three to four hundred pages, rich in fifteenth-century vocabulary, translated into French, English, Italian and German.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by the historian Giuseppe Bellini as one of the great Spanish-American novels of the century; a best-seller in Latin America in the 1980s.
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