The title of the book, originally also in English, is a gesture towards Chavism’s failure to resist US influence. This is a political novel about the financial crisis and socio-political division in Venezuela from 2008 to 2010. The author shifts between crime fiction and metafiction, cautioning readers that the events retold are both true and manipulated. The central narrator is a psychiatrist who manipulates the accounts of his friend, an author writing a book titled The Night and his patient, an advertising executive obsessed with understanding the world through word puzzles. They recount contradictory versions of the plot, a series of femicides that began with the energy crisis. Real and fictional characters, most of them are writers, exchange the role of narrator in this polyphonic novel. Recurring blackouts envelop Caracas in an inescapable darkness that makes nightmares come true. The Night Author: Rodrigo Blanco Calderon Publisher: Seven Stories Press ISBN-10: 644210401 / ISBN-13: 978-1644210406 Las Comadres and Friends National Latino Book Club.Emile Ford, legendary St.Connecting Latinas through literature! Main menu Skip to content.

Rodrigo Blanco Calderón is also author of three collections of short stories: Una larga fila de hombres, Los invencibles, and Las rayas. Blanco Calderón participated in the 2007 Hay Festival Bogota as one of “Latin America’s 39 Most Exciting Authors Under 39.” He is the founder of the publishing house and bookstore Lugar Común, and he teaches literature at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Pedro Alamo, one of the characters in this polyphonic novel, searches obsessively through word games-words that his admired Dario Lancini creates and dreams about-the key to understanding the deranged world in which he lives. As if he were seeking to turn reality into something different by changing the order of the elements that form it, thus trying to find its exact meaning. The energy crisis is used by the revolutionary government to enact power outages that, for hours, melt the country into black. In these periods of time, Venezuela seems to go back in history to a new Stone Age that seeps through all the cracks. In the midst of this atmosphere, two friends, a frustrated writer and a psychiatrist, are involved in the lives of their patients and talk about a series of crimes in the last year. “I am convinced that all evil in the world begins in them. In words.”Ĭaracas 2010. He was the winner of the Rive Gauche à Paris Award for the French translation of the novel, which was published this year by Gallimard in France, after having been published by Alfaguara in Spain and Madera Fina in Venezuela.ĭescription: A fable about Venezuela today, by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, an author who has been a revelation in Latin American literature of the recent years. The Night (2016) is a new book by Venezuelan author Rodrigo Blanco Calderón.

The night blanco calderon