Translation Rights TQE / The Bolivar Carriage

Doctor Justo Proceso apparently has everything he needs in order to feel fortunate: he works as a gynecologist in a small Colombian city, he has two houses, an attractive wife, a little daughter and an adolescent one, and a hobby for his free time which consists of researching the true story of Simón Bolívar. He becomes involved in a series of mix ups, however, which begin during the feast days of the holy innocents and the carnival parades of 1966 and force the dropping of false appearances. Poor Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso must come to terms with the fact that, in reality, his wife mocks him, his daughters do not really take him into account, and his friends take advantage of him. When the local tyrant starts shooting at the artisans that are working on a burlesque carriage, the doctor decides to use the sculptural group to ridicule Bolívar, the liberator. Without knowing it, that decision mobilizes the important locals, the governor, the generals, and even a recently formed guerrilla group. The vaudeville leads to a sham, and the sham to a real form of danger and to a fateful threat. In Colombia, in the 1960s, everyone prefers to live a lie rather than question the founding myths.

Evelio Rosero was born in Bogota in 1958. He studied Social Communication at the Externado University in Colombia. He is the author of the trilogy “Primera Vez” (“First Time”) made up of the novels Mateo solo (Mateo Alone, 1984), Juliana los mira (Juliana Looks On, 1986) and El incendiado (The Burning Man, 1988, II Pedro Gómez Valderrama Prize to the best Colombian novel published between 1988 and 1992). His later novels, Señor que no conoce la luna (The Man Who Did Not Know the Moon, 1992), Las muertes de fiesta (The Deaths of Feasting, 1995), En el lejero (In the Distance, 2003), and Los almuerzos, which we now make available in Spain, as well as his books of short stories Las esquinas más largas (The Longest Corners, 1998) and Cuento para matar un perro y otros cuentos (To Kill a Dog and Other Stories, 1989) have been the subject of study and of theses. In 2006 he was awarded the National Prize for Literature in Colombia, but it was in 2007 with his novel Los ejércitos (The Armies), winner of the II Tusquets Editores Prize for Novel, that he became internationally known. The novel has been translated into seven different languages and has received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom. About the book, the jury claimed, “It is a novel of love, war and pain written with utmost beauty”.