Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District - Softcover

Argueta, Manlio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880684322 ISBN 13: 9781880684320

Publisher: Curbstone Books, 1998

Synopsis

Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District is Manlio Argueta's most popular novel in El Salvador, translated into English for the first time by Edward Waters Hood. A kaleidoscopic tale of political romance, the story revolves around the relationship of two young lovers in a time of social upheaval, evoking characters and themes from the classic fairy tale within the wartime environment of El Salvador and its capital, San Salvador.
 

About this title

About the Author

Manlio Argueta was born in San Miguel, El Salvador in 1935. He left the country in 1972 and lived in exile in Costa Rica, where he taught literature and creative writing until the end of the Salvadoran Civil War. His second novel, Caperucita en la zona rosa, received the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1977. His third, Un día en la vida, was banned in El Salvador during the civil war but earned fifth place on the Modern Library's 100 best Latin American novels of the twentieth century. He currently lives in San Salvador.

Edward Waters Hood has translated works by several prominent Central American authors. He is currently a professor of Latin American Literature at Northern Arizona University. 

 

Reviews

Little Red Riding Hood in the Red Light District reminds us why for the poor in Latin America guerrilla warfare (as well as drug trafficking) is often the only alternative to unemployment and hunger.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Curbstone Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1880684322
• ISBN 13: 9781880684320
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232