Novel
Percusión
Not translated into English
José Balza · 1982
Synopsis
After forty years away, a man returns to Caranat, his native city, the novelistic name for Caracas. He left at twenty-five and is now sixty-five; on the way back, he feels his body growing younger, and he addresses a “tú” who is himself as a young man. He recounts a long journey from city to city, through places with changed names such as Dawaschuwa, which stands for Antigua, in Guatemala, and his encounters of mind and love with Harry, Dorotea, Elvira or Lina. The narrative goes back over his past and the successive transformations of his personality, and gives a large place to erotic experience.
Context
The novel was published in Barcelona in 1982 by Seix Barral, under the subtitle “ejercicio narrativo” that several other books by the author also bear. It was reissued in Bogotá in 1991, then in Madrid in 2022 in a critical edition by Juan Carlos Chirinos, who presents it as a classic of Venezuelan letters: the narrator splits in two and moves along a river of language that accompanies his journey. Critics have read in it the consecration of the instant, the myths of Narcissus and of eternal return, or a process of knowledge; a study from the University of Zulia sees it rather as a pastiche, a monologue in multiple tenses and full of ambiguities.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred and sixty pages, in Spanish, untranslated; the narrative moves from one time and one voice to another without warning.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's best example, and in 2022 it became a classic with a critical edition in Spain.
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