Stranger to the Moon
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Descripción editorial
A fantastical novel about power and subservience by the great Evelio Rosero, winner of Colombia’s National Literature Prize
The renowned Colombian writer Evelio Rosero has never been one to shy away from the darker aspects of his nation’s history and society. His magnificent novel Stranger to the Moon portrays a world that seems to exist outside time and place but taps into the dark myths and collective subconscious of his country, with its harrowing inequality and violence. A parable of pointed social criticism, with naked humans imprisoned in a house in order to serve the needs of “the vicious clothed ones,” the novel describes what ensues when a single “naked one” privately rebels, risking his own death and that of his fellow prisoners. Each subsequent section of the book adds further layers to the ritualistic and bizarre social order inhabited by its characters. Insects and reptiles are trained as agents and spies against the naked ones, and only the most fortunate humans manage to reach old age by taking up strategic spots near the kitchens and grabbing for the fiercely contested food. Stranger to the Moon is a brave, powerful, and distinctive novel by a writer who arguably holds the strongest claim to the title of Colombia’s greatest living author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Colombian writer Rosero (The Armies) delivers a taut allegory about inequality and abuse in which one set of people, who are clothed, oppress those who are made to stay naked. The naked live apart from the clothed in an overcrowded house without enough food. The clothed revel in forcing menial, sexual, and degrading tasks upon the naked, as well as torturing and executing them via luridly sadistic means involving barbed wire, excrement, hot coals, and more. The narrator lives in a wardrobe in the house, alone except for when the clothed arrive to throw parties for themselves at the expense of the naked, and stuff those they consider undesirable into the wardrobe. Gradually, a story emerges in the narrator's acts of rebellion, beginning with a refusal to allow the clothed to examine the narrator's sexual organs, and culminating with an uncomfortable truth linking oppressed and oppressor. Throughout, Rosero's prose, translated with lyricism by McLean, conveys the characters' horrifying human nature with aplomb (on the clothed: "they arrive sometimes like a fantastic whirlwind, whooping with excitement, and at other times with heads bowed, as if already repenting of the great error they wish to commit"). Disturbing and powerful, this one is hard to forget.
