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Ayacucho, Goodbye: Moscow's Gold : Two Novellas on Peruvian Politics and Violence
In the first of two allegorical novellas, Peruvian peasant leader Alfonso Cánepa is murdered and mutilated by the police, but feeling unsatisfied with his death, the dead man sets out to recover his missing bones and seek Christian burial. During the pilgrimage from his mountain village to the capital he relates an epic satire of a Peru torn apart by a decade of terrorism and government repression. Stuck between life and death, the incomplete body of Cánepa finds humor, cynicism, and hope in a nation that has become "a graveyard with an airport." In Moscow's Gold , a Peruvian teenager's life is unexpectedly disrupted and complicated by the strains and repressions of the Cold War era. He realizes that sometimes a person must come to terms with the people that friends can become when put under pressure.
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
16 people want to read
About the author
Julio Ortega
108 books17 followersEscritor, crítico peruano y profesor de la Universidad de Brown en Estados Unidos. Autor de "Una poética del cambio" (1992), "El principio radical de lo nuevo" (1997), "Trasatlantic Translations" (2006) y "Rubén Darío y la lectura mutua" (2004), entre otros textos. De su trabajo más reciente destaca "El hacer poético" (2011) en colaboración con María Ramírez Ribes.
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July 12, 2013
A little bit too transparently allegorical and polemic for my tastes.
A better criticism could be that linking the then-current problems in Peru to the Pizarro innovation is just way too easy. But maybe not. In the US, it's not exaggeration to say that our foundational sin—slavery—is at least lurking behind almost all of our major political issues, even if the proximate cause is different. It might not be accurate in a documentary sense, but in a national mythos sense, it is. If landing at Plymouth Rock and Plymouth Rock landing on us is the essential conflict of America from a literary point of view, then it's certainly not a stretch to say the events at Cajamarca were that for Peru.
A better criticism could be that linking the then-current problems in Peru to the Pizarro innovation is just way too easy. But maybe not. In the US, it's not exaggeration to say that our foundational sin—slavery—is at least lurking behind almost all of our major political issues, even if the proximate cause is different. It might not be accurate in a documentary sense, but in a national mythos sense, it is. If landing at Plymouth Rock and Plymouth Rock landing on us is the essential conflict of America from a literary point of view, then it's certainly not a stretch to say the events at Cajamarca were that for Peru.
Displaying 1 of 1 review