From Amazon.com
Salvadoran author Manlio Argueta spent almost 20 years exiled from his native land during the turbulent decades of the El Salvadoran civil war. During that time he completed this, his second novel, which went on to became a huge success in his own country. The hero of this allegorical tale is Alfonso, a young student turned radical who eventually abandons his clandestine printing press and joins the guerrilla forces in the countryside. Before that, however, Alfonso is involved in a passionate love affair with his own "Little Red Riding Hood," whom he leaves pregnant in "the Red Light District," the impoverished barrio where he lives, (and also the allegorical name for El Salvador's repressive regime) when he goes off to war. Told through letters, dialogs and narrative, Argueta's political novel is both a compelling work of art and a vivid portrait of the lives of ordinary people in 1970s El Salvador.
From Publishers Weekly
Argueta's charmingly elusive political romance, Caperucita en la zona roja, first appeared in 1978 and received the Casa de las Americas Prize; it is newly revised for this English translation. Alfonso, the "wolf," is a poet and university student who gradually becomes entangled in the revolution against El Salvador's military dictatorship of the late 1970s, whose abusive reign Argueta allegorizes as the "red light district." The plot unfolds in voice-shifting narrative backtracks, from the time Alfonso is still living "in the forest" with "Little Red Riding Hood," his young peasant lover Ant (who is referred to alternately in the second and third person), to his later departure, while Ant is pregnant, to become "a bandolier of liberation." Ant's trusting simplicity emerges from her letters to her lover, while the naively ferocious dedication of Alfonso's compa?eros, who attempt to disseminate literature by an illegal printing press, demonstrates the power of a poor, beleaguered people's spirit to prevail. Argueta's use of allegory is coy and not altogether successful; he unaccountably compares the "wolves" in question to Alfonso and his revolutionaries, rather than to the more logical choice of soldiers and military men. Still, through the voices of his characters, Argueta portrays the aspirations of an entire generation. "I've never thought about having a child as long as I live in this sublimation of a man disappeared," Alfonso muses, revealing the author's ability to maintain a lightness of tone while tackling serious political issues.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
