Dominican Republic / All works
Novel
La tierra está bramando
Not translated into English
Hilma Contreras · 1986
Synopsis
Under the Trujillo dictatorship, young people organise themselves underground: no more telephone, no more visits, an apparently ordinary life, while the police hunt them down. Around them, their mothers and grandmothers, doña Teófila and doña Eugenia, tremble for their children without disowning what they stand for, and a love is born amid the student struggles without managing to come to fulfilment.
Context
The novel was published in 1986 in the Orfeo series of the Biblioteca Nacional, after two collections of stories, one of them devoted to life underground, in 1962. Acento reads it as a tribute to the strength of mothers under state violence. Giovanni di Pietro, very harsh, sees in it only a series of pages on the dictatorship, student struggles and an unfulfilled love, while noting that others regard it as a well-made novel.
Who it is for
In Spanish; a novel from inside families under the dictatorship, more attentive to silences than to action.
Prizes and reception
A much-debated novel: hailed by Acento as a tribute to mothers, harshly judged by the critic Di Pietro.