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Dust on Her Tongue (Paperback, New edition) Loot Price: R310
Discovery Miles 3 100
You Save: R66 (18%)
Dust on Her Tongue (Paperback, New edition): Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Dust on Her Tongue (Paperback, New edition)

Rodrigo Rey Rosa; Translated by Bowles Paul, Paul Bowles

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List price R376 Loot Price R310 Discovery Miles 3 100 You Save R66 (18%)

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Twelve tales - many evoking the uncanny, most with surprise endings - explore how people seek to gain power from others. While perhaps the entire collection is informed by political violence and repression in the author's Guatemala, only one - "Angelica" - touches outfight on the practices of political terrorism. In other pieces, killing is ritualistic and at times existential. In "The Proof," a boy kills a canary believing that if God exists, He will prove himself by bringing the bird back to life; in "The Truth," a young man drops a stone from a bridge "like a god from on high, changing the life of a mortal." Domination and freedom are personal - not political - goals and sought sometimes through trickery and manipulation (as in "Burial," when an old man must play dead in order to end his days as he wishes; and in "Xquic," in which a hoax frees two academics from the university grind). "People of the Head" seems to be uncomfortably racist in its narrative assumptions until the ending turns those assumptions on their head. Throughout, people take and fall moral tests whenever personal advancement is at stake (as when the ethnomusicologist in "Las Lagrimas" helps cause a death so that he can record funeral chants). "Coralia" - about a woman, with "an ego as big as a cathedral," and the men she manipulates - is perhaps the most realistic and one of the more satisfying stories. Rey Rosa writes about danger and precarious stability in an effective, straightforward style - but most of these tales remain small and gimmicky. (Kirkus Reviews)

Set in Guatemala, these spare and beautiful tales are linked by themes of magic, violence, and the fragility of existence. Paul Bowle's translation perfectly captures Rey Rosa's stories of the haunted lives of ordinary people in present-day Central America.

General

Imprint: City Lights Books
Country of origin: United States
Release date: May 2023
First published: 2001
Authors: Rodrigo Rey Rosa
Translators: Bowles Paul • Paul Bowles
Dimensions: 200 x 137 x 7mm (L x W x T)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 124
Edition: New edition
ISBN-13: 978-0-87286-272-2
Subtitles: Spanish
Categories: Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN: 0-87286-272-0
Barcode: 9780872862722

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