[home] [news] [this year's award] [publishers] [libraries] [award archive] [faqs] [dublin city public libraries] [IMPAC] [contact us]

The 2010 Award

 

The Armies

The Armies

by Evelio Rosero

Translated from the original Spanish by Anne McLean

 

 

Nominated by:

  • Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogota, Colombia

Publisher of Nominated Edition:


MacLehose Press, UK

 
the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors
ABOUT THE BOOK

In the town of San Jose in the remote mountains of Colombia, Ismael, a retired teacher, spends his mornings gathering oranges in the sunshine and spying on his neighbour as she sunbathes naked in her garden. It is a languid existence, pierced only by his wife’s scolding; which induces in him the furtive guild of an ageing voyeur.
 Ismael returns from an early morning walk one day and cannot find his wife. The old man is fearful, for soon more people begin to go missing, and gradually bursts of gunfire can be heard in the distance. Sensing war drawing near, most pf the villagers make their escape but Ismael decides to stay, becoming an unwilling witness to the senseless violence steadily sweeping through his country.

Ismael’s story has the sad inevitability of an everyday occurrence in a country racked by civil war, where people disappear at the hands of unidentified soldiers: guerrillas; paramilitaries; and the so- called forces of order. In the Armies Rosero has created a hallucinatory, relentless, captivating narrative at times a violent as the events it describes, told by an old man battered by a reality be no longer understands.

(From Publisher).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Evelio Rosero is the author of seven novels and two collections of short stories, as well as books for children and young adults.

In Colombia his work has been recognized by the National Literature Award. The Armies won the Tusquets International Novel Prize in Guadalajara, Mexico.

LIBRARIANS' COMMENTS

The author gives a voice to people in Colombia’s small towns whose lives are affected by events going on around them (guerrillas, paramilitaries, national army)  and suffer desperation confusion, kidnapping, murder and rape.

 

[home] [news] [this year's award] [publishers] [libraries] [award archive] [dublin city public libraries] [IMPAC] [faqs] [contact us]

Copyright © 2011 Dublin City Public Libraries