Dominican Republic / All works
Novel
La biografía difusa de Sombra Castañeda
Not translated into English
Marcio Veloz Maggiolo · 1980
Synopsis
In Barrero, a village enclosed by walls whitened with salt and peopled with ciguapas, bacás, galipotes and Taíno or Afro-Caribbean gods, unfolds the life of Sombra Castañeda, an imaginary dictator. The inhabitants descend from four cousins, and incest has left its marks on some of them. The history of the island passes by, from the conquest to the Trujillo era; in counterpoint, Esculapio Ramírez lives under Trujillo while his double, Serapio Rendón, lives through the time of Sombra Castañeda, and fragments of Balaguer's funeral eulogy for Trujillo are interspersed in the narrative.
Context
The novel appeared in Caracas with Monte Ávila, then in Santo Domingo with the Taller publishing house. According to Bernardo Vega, its author drew on his excavations at Barreras, on the coast of Azua, where he came to know the local sorcerer. Fernando Valerio-Holguín reads in it the Dominican synthesis of the new historical novel, the ethnological novel and magical realism, and compares Barrero to García Márquez's Macondo; Adolfo Castañón makes it the emblem of its author's narrative work. Anne-Marie Meunier translated it into French for Éditions du Griot.
Who it is for
In Spanish, translated into French; a teeming novel with a fragmented chronology, which asks the reader to accept the marvellous and to have a few bearings on the Dominican past.
Prizes and reception
Awarded the national novel prize; the French translation, published in 1993, was reissued by Ginkgo in 2011.
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