Review by Choice Review
One of Latin America's particular and notable contributions to world literature has been the political novel. Beginning with Argentina's Jose Marmol in the 19th century and continuing into the 20th, Latin American narrative has depicted political turmoil in artful and often innovative ways. Such is the case with Bencastro's A Shot in the Cathedral. Combining first and third person points of view, speeches by El Salvador's slain Oscar Romero, dramatic dialogue, poems, and newspaper headlines, Bencastro looks at recent Salvadorean history in the only way an artist can: through the prism of creative stylization. Characters respond to the cruelty and repression of El Salvador's civil war with poems, paintings ... and this novel. Quoting Argentine novelist Ernesto Sabato, Lourdes--a poet and fugitive among the novel's characters--puts her faith in "artists ... who bravely confront the chaos, creating literature." Rascon's translation brings competently into English the beauty, power, and sadness of narrative Spanish in service to a political theme. Despite a pat and unmotivated ending, Bencastro's novel persuasively reports, describes, and synthesizes the hopelessness and transcendence of the brutal political struggle in El Salvador. Academic and public collections. B. L. Lewis Lyon College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Originally published in Mexico in 1990, Bencastro's dramatic, powerful first novel focuses on the military coup d'etat in El Salvador in 1979, and the new ruling junta's brutal repression of the people through massacres of peasants, political assassinations and the kidnapping, torture and execution of tens of thousands of students, workers and ordinary citizens. Its young, idealistic narrator, newspaper reporter and painter Rogelio Villaverde, returns to El Salvador from the U.S. to search for his parents and two brothers, who, he later learns, have fled to Honduras. His girlfriend, Lourdes, a poet and teacher of fiercely proud Mayan ancestry, goes underground to avoid capture by the police. His boss, Dominguez, arrested and beaten by government security forces, is saved at the last minute, only to see the newspaper offices bombed. The plot highlights a real-life figure, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Archbishop Oscar Romero, voice of the oppressed, who was assassinated during a mass in 1980 after protesting the U.S. government's aid to the right-wing regime. Bencastro, a native of El Salvador who has lived in Virginia since 1978, interpolates news bulletins, letters, poems and Romero's homilies into the narrative to create a vivid newsreel of a country disintegrating. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Shot In The Cathedral ($18.95; Sept. 1, 1996; 220 pp.; 1-55885- 164-X): A skillful balance between journalistic reportage and a subjective focus on the lives of ordinary people afflicted by political upheaval distinguishes this otherwise familiar (and somewhat melodramatic) picture of El Salvador under siege in the late 1970s. The suspension of civil rights by a right-wing military regime and the persecution of a populist archbishop are crucial elements in a vivid and engrossing sequence of events whose deeply involved observer--an average man who unaccountably becomes both newspaper reporter and hero--makes powerfully real for us the human dimensions of war's phlegmatic impersonality.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
