Comrades (Guatemala)
ISBN: 9781906300067 Price: £8.99 Click to buy
By Marco Antonio Flores
Translated by Leona Nickless
THE LONG exile of a Latin American classic is over with the publication of this masterful translation 30 years after Marco Antonio Flores lit the fuse of an explosive new genre in Central American literature with his polemical, naked and brutal novel Los compañeros (Comrades).
Hailed as a masterpiece when first published in 1976, Comrades relates the stories of young revolutionaries embroiled in Guatemala’s bloody civil war and describes how their zeal was coloured by a cocktail of sex, booze and ambition.
Comrades is recognised as establishing a new genre the “nueva novela guatemalteca” or “new Guatemalan novel”. It addressed in raw and candid language the country’s conflict and caused uproar on the Left. Heavily influenced by James Joyce, Marco Antonio Flores has created an intricate map of the peregrinations and emotional journeys travelled by a generation of young Guatemalans caught in a maelstrom of violence they were unable to control.
Translator Leona Nickless has achieved what others tried yet failed to do, capturing the author’s intimate knowledge of the language of the Guatemalan streets. Written in a highly original colloquial style that shoved the gun-toting language of the Marxist guerrilla - loaded with profanity and insolence - in the face of readers for the first time, Comrades retains all the raw power and youthful anger of its era. It will be published in the UK in February 2009.
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‘Los compañeros (1976) by Marco Antonio Flores, marks the first time the forms and techniques of nueva narrativa combine with testimony in Guatemalan literature… at times becoming an ideologically subversive ‘anti-novel’’
- Linda J. Craft, Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America
‘A disenchanted Marxist, Guatemalan Marco Antonio Flores, unburdens himself with a scathing satire at the expense of his erstwhile comrades …’
- Roy C. Boland Osegueda, The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel
‘The stylistic innovations, the criticisms of the failed guerrilla movement and the condemnations of government and military violence all broke with past traditions and anticipated the testimonial novel’
- Maureen E. Shea, Culture and Customs of Guatemala
‘A fistful of life experiences that, mixed together in a magisterial way … situate Marco Antonio Flores alongside García Márquez, Donoso or Vargas’
- Revista Tiempo, Madrid
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