Narrative
Fire from the Mountain
La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde
Omar Cabezas · 1982
Synopsis
The author, narrator and character of his own account, tells listeners who never reply about his life as a student in León, his activity in the student movement, his entry into the Sandinista Front, then his departure for the mountains of the north, where he becomes one of the first guerrillas. He does so in an oral, familiar language, with humour and self-mockery.
Context
The book appeared in 1982 in Havana, in the series of winners of the Casa de las Américas Prize, testimony category, and the same year in Managua from Nueva Nicaragua. It became the best-selling book of the new Nicaragua, with nearly seventy thousand copies. Translated into English by Kathleen Weaver under the title Fire from the Mountain, with an introduction by Carlos Fuentes, in 1985, it inspired a documentary by Deborah Shaffer; Mantero devoted a study to it in 2019.
Who it is for
For reading one of the most widely read guerrilla testimonies of Central America, in Spanish or English, not translated into French.
Prizes and reception
Jonathan Steele, in the London Review of Books, finds it funny and self-mocking, and sees in it the spirit of Sandinismo better rendered than elsewhere.
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