Novel
Los pequeños seres
Not translated into English
Salvador Garmendia · 1959
Synopsis
Mateo Martán, a section head in the accounting department of a large company, married to Amelia and father of Antonio, learns of the death of his direct superior; it earns him a promotion that brings him closer to management, but the news exhausts him instead of delighting him. On the day of the funeral, he follows the procession and gets lost. In the following days, he goes from a psychologist's consultation to a travelling circus and as far as an abandoned station, while the house of his childhood, his father and his uncle come back to him.
Context
The book appeared in 1959, shortly after the fall of Pérez Jiménez and as the journal Sardio was being founded, and won the Caracas municipal prose prize. An external narrator keeps slipping into the character's head, and the narrative jumps from present to past. Critics see in it the entry of the big city into the Venezuelan novel: an anonymous, maladjusted employee, without heroism, whose thought becomes, according to Diario VEA, a way of escaping a changing reality.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French or English translation. The narration passes without warning from the outside to the inside of a mind.
Prizes and reception
Awarded a prize by the city of Caracas in the year of its publication, it is the book through which critics bring the modern city into the country's novel.
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