Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
1. I already admired the work of Deep Vellum, because this is a press that publishes works in translation from writers all over the world, however.
2. Their decision to publish Blood of the Dawn is BOLD, is a statement, is a political act, and I love them even more because.
3. This is one of the most important novels not only for of its close depiction of the revolution brought by Sendero Luminoso and its bloody effect on the Peruvian society, but because of Claudia Salazar Jimenez´ decision to use the perspective of three brilliant characters.
4. Three women, three very different women who experience this revolution; first they experience it in three very different ways as each one of them holds or is forced to hold a different role in it; but then, then it seems that they endure it the same way: the wave of violence in their lives, their bodies, their minds.
5. More: Claudia Salazar Jimenez is a solid and breathtaking fiction writer, she grabs grammar, syntax, language and makes them explode, as if only a burst of them all was possible to depict the blood, the dawn, the women, the war.
6. Almost at the end, one of the characters says: “Violence is the midwife of history.”
7. And it is.