Name: Afternoon of the Dinosaur
SKU: 56356736
Price: 47.89 NZD
Availability: InStock
Author: Cristina Peri Rossi
ISBN: 9780615955636

Type

Physical Book

Author

Translated by

Publisher

Language

English

Pages

124

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

21.6x14x0.7 cm

Weight

0.17 kg.

ISBN13

9780615955636

Synopsis "Afternoon of the Dinosaur"

Afternoon of the Dinosaur, by Cristina Peri Rossi, one of the most important Spanish writers of our time, was first published in 1976. Due to censorship in Spain under Franco, it was initially distributed only in Latin America. Then, in 1984, it was published again by Plaza y Janés (Barcelona), and in 2008 it was reissued by Tropo Editores (Zaragoza). This volume is composed of eight lyrical and powerful short stories bound together by themes of alienation and generational conflict in the modern world. According to the author, "the stories are all connected by a sense of persecution and by the solidarity that this sometimes creates between two persons." The first, "From Brother to Sister," deals with the yearnings of love of an adolescent for his sister. In the second, "At the Beach," a young couple encounters a child who both mystifies and troubles them with her extraordinary questions. With "The Influence of Edgar A. Poe on the Poet Raimundo Arias," we find the deep-felt sense of exile of Peri Rossi herself. Two pieces of this collection that carry the title "Simulacrum" give us a science-fiction world of space travel in which human feelings are lost. As the author says, "the final word of the tale is 'mercy, ' (it is a sense of) pity that I feel for myself and for all human beings, because we are condemned to die, to suffer dictatorships, because we are condemned many times to oppression, and we need to seek out, in the midst of this suffering, our fellow men." As for the title story of this collection, "The Afternoon of the Dinosaur," the author confesses that her dreams, at the time of the military dictatorship in Montevideo when people simply disappeared," were often haunted by terrifying dinosaurs. The dinosaur, for her, symbolized fear, danger, the threat of the government. She wanted to tame the dinosaur, to change it into a loving character. It was only after she wrote this story that dinosaurs disappeared from her dreams. Julio Cortázar writes: "Cristina Peri Rossi is not only aware of the hells of this world, she understand the lures of paradise. Her exquisite prose projects her readers into a surrealistic realm that is filled with forbidden yet fascinating choices." In his introduction to the Spanish version of "La tarde del dinosaurio," he says: "In three of the stories from this book the children will lay bare the world of those who claim to control it, and will reduce it to a laughingstock of truth... Brothers and sisters, queens and slaves, false adults incapable of accepting the laws of the game, people that an Aubrey Beardsley or an Egon Schiele would have drawn with the perverse perfection of sterile desire, of a pursuit whose sole incentive is that of not catching the prey, whether it be named Patricia or Alexandra, Igor or Alina. False adults, for the simple reason that adults are false. And the adolescent turns to its past in a last, desperate act of resistance; but its sex and its hair and its voice drag it to the peak that the boy of the dinosaur contemplates in final horror. Now there are no victims or assassins in those rooms of the house; the last of its visitors is able only to utter one useless word: Mercy."

Cristina Peri Rossi

(Author)

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Cristina Peri Rossi was born in Montevideo (Uruguay) in 1941. She studied Music and Biology and graduated in Comparative Literature. She has collaborated with various media outlets and has done significant work as a translator. She published her first book of stories in 1963, and soon became one of the most notable writers of her generation. In 1972, she moved to Barcelona and acquired Spanish nationality. Her narrative work includes titles such as Los museos abandonados, La nave de los locos, Solitario de amor, Desastres íntimos (Lumen, 1997; 2022) and Habitaciones privadas. Lumen also published many of her poetry collections, among which stand out Diáspora, Babel bárbara (Ciudad de Barcelona Award), Otra vez Eros, Aquella noche, Las musas inquietantes and Estrategias del deseo. She has been distinguished, among others, with the following awards: Award Book for poetry (1992) and story (1994), Rafael Alberti International Poetry Award (2000), Loewe (2008), Mario Vargas Llosa NH for stories (2010), José Donoso (2019) and Cervantes Award (2021), the last two in recognition of her entire body of work.

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