Los dejo con los comentarios introductorios de James Kelly, traductor del libro.
Bagual is the first novel of Chilean writer Felipe Becerra Calderón (1985), unanimously awarded first place in Chile’s prestigious Roberto Bolaño Prize (2006) for the categories of short story and novel, and recipient of the Literary Creation Scholarship from the Chilean National Council for Culture and the Arts. He is currently
working on his second novel Ñache.
Set in the wilderness of the Chilean desert, Bagual is a lucid exploration of the effects of madness and solitude. The combination of intertwining narrative voices and a hallucinatory intensity draws the readers deep into the minds of its principle characters, Rocío and her husband Carlos Molina, a lieutenant in the Chilean police force. This selection of chapters captures the poise and delicacy of Becerra’s prose and contrasts the intensity of the monologues of the voices by which Rocío is tormented, with the objective third-person narration of the life of her husband. Alongside Molina’s entries in the official police log-book, the three narrative voices combine to create a truly polyvocal text with a latent atmosphere of unease that simmers like a slow burning fuse throughout the novel until reaching its culmination in the vivid intensity of the final chapters. Sprinkled with touches of macabre humour and a keen eye for detail, at once delicate and disturbing, Bagual is a text which fascinates and tantalizes the reader, drawing them towards a forever displacing centre and leaving them searching for the final word in a text in which the word itself can never be final.
