‘The King’, by Reynaldo Sietecase: powerful female character

Reynaldo Sietecase has imagined a plot with several Other points of interest. The first is inhabited by Paraguayan field people who communicate in Guaraní, of which the novel offers quite a few phrases, clarified in a final glossary. They form a more widespread archaic culture than it seems, and that at the point where the novel begins, in Ciudad del Este, on the border of Paraguay with Argentina and Brazil, very close to the cataracts of Iguazú, it serves to communicate the two female characters that They help each other to flee to a life that releases them.

Maruca lives on prostitution, and Blanca Rosa is thirteen years old when It is persistently violated by the recoursehis grandmother’s lover. Maruca helps the girl to escape towards a life, that of the Buenos Aires of Drug Traffickers’ neighborhoods, with two rival bands, who welcome Blanca, the Paraguayans, and their Peruvian rivals. Both have paid to the police, which turns a blind eye.

One of that band’s bosses falls in love with Blanca who teaches how much he has to know to survive in those environments. Sietecase It knows how to transmit that world with descriptive force that, despite appearances, offers in a contained way, whose low funds realism transmits without moralism, subject to the codes that govern such a sub -world. Alternate the narration of the history of the known since then as ‘the king’, with Other chapters that take place in Madrid and Oxfordbecause an anthropology professor, Argentine exiled with several decades in Spain is interested in a mythical history transmitted pro Fray Bernardino de Sahagúnauthor of one of the most interesting books of the Mexican culture, entitled ‘General history of the things of New Spain’, written in Nahualt language whose mythology transmitted us, suffering for its comprehensive tone, the censorship of the Inquisition.

Even if it was only for the possibility of bringing this jewel closer to the reader, I would already deserve the reading of this novel of Sietecase. Both this scholar, Salvador Merino, as a friend of his, Américo, (excessive the choice of such name) regent of the bookstore of the Museum of Madrid Anthropology, they hold conversations about the description dThe magical power of an obsidian mirror, whose largest specimen exhibits the museum, and whose properties had been described by John Dee, a wise alchemist protected by the court of Isabel of England, who had left explained in a manuscript guarded by the Oxford Bodleiana, where Salvador Merino goes in pilgrimage and investigation.

Obviously there is a relationship between this story of the Obsidian magic with the amulet of that metal that Blanca’s grandmother possessed, and that she appropriates before fleeing to Argentina. The two stories, the investigation of the Obsidian stone magic and that of the king run parallel in the novel until come to cross in a surprising endson of a good narrator.

Because that quality is the best of Sietecase, shared today by so many Latin American. They know how to tell stories with the ability that in Spain we have long lost and that nourish, by the way, a genre like that of the narconovela to which it is approaching. The last point of interest, not less, is that of white trafficking, or prostitution business with immigrants, run by mafias settled in Madrid, where the king ends prisoner for serving them who helps her escape from Buenos Aires when The rival band murders.

The narration of that other underworld, Madrid, who has dams in brothels to Latin American immigrants is another of the conditions that provide interest to this novel. Nor does the cruel veracity of the counted save, nor is it overwhelmed in the dirty. Again a writer is good when, as it happens here, the reality to which it serves, herself horrible in her literalness, is counted directly horrible but sober.