El testigo
Juan Villoro

FICTION | 2004 | 480 pages

WINNER OF THE 2004 HERRALDE NOVEL PRIZE

Julio Valdivieso, a Mexican intellectual who emigrated to Europe and teaches at the University of Nanterre, returns to his country after a long absence.

The PRI have finally lost the elections and a peculiar period of transition has begun. But this return to a present that is very different from the one he left behind will become an opportunity to decipher his past and that of his family and his country in a novel that unfolds like a disturbing mechanism of precision. Because Julio, like all exiles, returns to that strange time of returns, a past that is always present where one meets again with the ghost of what could have been, with the seductive impossibility of resuming life where one left it. And in this ecstatic and terrible return, there are reunions that lead him to the keys of a lost love, to an episode of the Cristero War on which his own name depends, to the living legend of the poet Ramón López Velarde, the first modern poet of Mexico, who also lived and wrote in another period of transition, a moment in time where the first of the moderns is sometimes the last of the ancients.

And how to tell this story? Because after the fall of the PRI, a new narrative is imposed, a new version of history. Even on television.

And in this story where all these stories converge, where the impossible return home is perhaps possible, Valdivieso will meet the novelist Constantino Portella, who turns disorder into thrilling bestsellers; the businessman Gándara, a minotaur crouching in his labyrinth who tries to produce authorial trash television; and the priest Monteverde, who seeks strong reasons for faith in the convulsive environment.

And he meets lgnacia, the Penelope of all returns. Voices that ask for a witness, an accomplice, a narrator of the story. Because in his unique rite of passage, Valdivieso has returned to an Ithaca battered by the accurate blows of organized crime and politics understood as conspiracy, to a Mexico where the poorly settled accounts of the Revolution return with an air of tragicomedy, where the epic becomes a soap opera.

An ironic review of the myths and the media condition of the contemporary world, an exultant vindication of poetry as a lasting substrate in the chaos of history, El testigo is one of the most stimulating and intelligent novels of contemporary Latin American literature—or of contemporary literature in general—with which Juan Villoro indisputably places himself in the first row of writers of his generation.

RIGHTS: spanish ANAGRAMA | italian GRAN VIA

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