Chambacú: Black Sun
By Colombian novelist Manuel Zapata OlivellaTranslated by Jonathan Tittler
ISBN: 0-935480-39-0
Price: $12.95
Pages: 128
A powerful novel set amidst the misery of a mosquito-infested island, near the tropical city of Cartagena, in a masterful translation by Jonathan Tittler. The novel portrays the plight of a single mother and her family whose lives are touched irrevocably by the war between the United States and Korea. Uneducated, indigent, and disunited, the protagonists represent the condition of a countless diaspora of blacks throughout the Caribbean as well as that of the nations of Latin America and the Third World in general.
"...Olivella writes with the robust naturalism of
Zola"
--Publishers Weekly
"...Manuel Zapata Olivella tells of a Colombia and a
Latin America we seldom hear about, yet the picture he
paints is as familiar as a glance in the mirror. Chambacú:
Black Slum centers on the tribulations of a long
suffering Afro-Colombian mother and her man-children,
archtypical figures we have seen before in literature from A
Raisin in the Sun to The Women of Brewster Place
...."
--Washington Post