Novel
El mago de la cara de vidrio
Not translated into English
Eduardo Liendo · 1973
Synopsis
Ceferino Rodríguez Quiñónez, a secondary-school teacher in the Caracas of the sixties, holds to the old values of school and family. A television set enters his house, Mister TV, which he christens the magician with the glass face, and gradually wins over his household, his son Carlitos, Guillermina, who serves in the house, and the rest of the family, down to Uncle Porfirio. Like Don Quixote before the books of chivalry, Ceferino goes to war against the intruder, its programmes and its commercials, and the satire extends to anticipation in the chapter “Juicio póstumo”.
Context
An insert in the daily El Nacional announced on 26 July 1973 the publication of the book with Monte Ávila, in the El Dorado series. Liendo had begun it in 1971 in a public library in Caracas. Television plays in it the role that chivalric romances played for Don Quixote, and an epigraph by Mark Twain opens the book. It has gone through seventeen editions and several reprints, and a thesis from the Central University studies it in 2019 among its author's novels devoted to the media.
Who it is for
A satirical novel in Spanish, with no French translation, read from primary school to university.
Prizes and reception
One of the most widely distributed and best-selling novels of Venezuelan literature, it has become a cult book.
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