Novel
The Knots of Silence
Los nudos del silencio
Renée Ferrer · 1988
Synopsis
In the last years of the Stroessner dictatorship, Malena, a middle-class Paraguayan passionate about music, stays in Paris with her husband Manuel. One evening, he drags her against her will to an erotic cabaret where a young Vietnamese woman, Mei Li, dances, and the show overwhelms her. Between childhood memories and the present, the novel lays bare the domination she suffers in her marriage and, behind Manuel, the violence and torture of the Paraguayan regime.
Context
The book appeared in Asunción in 1988, from Arte Nuevo Editores, in the last months of the regime of Alfredo Stroessner, after the author's poems and stories. Reissued several times, it was translated into French by Indigo in 2000, into Italian in 2005 and into English in 2012 by Betsy Partyka, under the title The Knots of Silence. A Spanish edition appeared in Valencia in 2007, with a prologue by José Vicente Peiró. The studies of Marchevska and Urdangarain read in it the alliance of a critique of patriarchy and a denunciation of authoritarianism.
Who it is for
For reading a Paraguayan novel in which the hold of a husband and that of a regime echo each other, in Spanish or English.
Prizes and reception
For Urdangarain, the novel opens the way to a female consciousness in Paraguayan literature.
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