Novel
Drums for Rancas
Redoble por Rancas
Manuel Scorza · 1970
Synopsis
In the department of Pasco, between 1959 and 1962, a distant and faceless mining company, the Cerro de Pasco Corporation, has an immense fence put up that swallows the pastures of the puna; the communities' livestock starve, and legal appeals fail. In Yanahuanca, Judge Montenegro rules over the region, so much so that a coin dropped from his pocket stays for months on the square without anyone daring to pick it up; the peasant Héctor Chacón, known as the Nyctalope, determined to put an end to his abuses, prepares his revenge.
Context
The first of the five novels of the cycle La guerra silenciosa, completed in 1979, the book draws its material from the peasant struggles of the department of Pasco, which the author had supported and whose manifestos he wrote. Two stories alternate chapter by chapter, linked by place and period, with a tenderness for the comuneros that blends with cruel irony and an animist vision of the world. Translated into French as early as 1972 by Claude Couffon, as Roulements de tambours pour Rancas, then into English by Edith Grossman, the cycle has appeared in more than forty languages.
Who it is for
For a great indigenist novel, at once a chronicle of a real injustice and a fable with touches of magical realism.
Prizes and reception
The opening of a cycle read all over the world, it made its author one of the voices of the Indian revolt in the Andes.