Novel
La isla sin mar
Not translated into English
Juan Bautista Rivarola Matto · 1987
Synopsis
A landlocked country, hemmed in by history and turned away from the world, tells its own story as an island without a sea. The novel follows a people that has sought, since the most distant times, the Land without Evil of the Guarani myth, through dismemberments, wars, revolutions and dictatorships, and suggests that the Republic was founded by a handful of castaways who abandoned there their dreams of El Dorado and of Paitití. Its characters are half flesh, half dreams, ghosts or hallucinations.
Context
The book appeared in 1987 from Arte Nuevo, in Asunción, and closes a trilogy begun with Yvypóra, in 1970, and Diagonal de sangre, in 1986, on the War of the Triple Alliance; the author had intended his novels as a single book, brought together after his death under the title Bandera sobre las tumbas. Osvaldo González Real, who introduced it, sees in it a lucid search for meaning in the fate of peoples who live on the margins of history, shut in by a physical and spiritual continentality. Two of his plays were awarded prizes ten days after his death.
Who it is for
In Spanish, never translated into French; a long novel of nearly five hundred pages. It is better to know that Paraguay has no access to the sea.
Prizes and reception
Its author's last novel and the culmination of a trilogy about a small nation isolated by geography.
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