English Translation of Bolivian Novel ¡ Hijo De Opa! / Son of the Murdered Maid
| Author: | Vallejo, Gaby | |
| Year: | 2002 | |
| Pages: | 208 | |
| ISBN: | 0-7734-7211-8 978-0-7734-7211-2 | |
| Price: | $179.95 + shipping | |
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The novel chronicles the degeneration of a middle-class landowning family related to the national Revolution of 1952, agrarian reform and three decades of political repression. Vallejo skillfully intertwines “public” political abuse with “private” abuse of females, in which both silence and illness play major thematic and stylistic roles.
Reviews
“. . . a brilliant translation. This novel will be a most important addition to the archive of fiction by Latin American authors, and women novelists especially, now available to the Anglophone world. This is a complex novel, written in a form meant to convey a layered history. . . . Weldon has preserved this complexity as well as the at times subtle textual clues that allow a certain thread of coherence for the reader to follow. Her Introduction is a valuable guide for the English speaking reader, introducing Vallejo as a writer, the history out of which the novel was written, and some of the major features of the story and of its narrative form. . . . There are powerful lessons here for those of us who want to learn more about the limits of representation in the struggle against repression in Bolivia, about the role of art and cultures of resistance in that struggle – but also about that most magical and loving practice of translation that brings this book into the hands of English speaking readers.” – Rosemary Hennessy