Works Eduardo González Viaña

Vallejo en los infiernos (Alfaqueque Ediciones, Spain, October 2008)

Between November 1920 and March 1921 the renowned Peruvian poet César Vallejo was imprisoned in Trujillo public jail, accused of instigating an attack in his home town of Santiago de Chuco, which led to three deaths, a fire and looting.Bribed by the poet’s enemies, the judge in charge of the investigation forged signatures and documents. The police extracted a signed confession, under torture, from one of the actual perpetrators of the crime even though he was illiterate. With the mountain of evidence piled against him, the author of España, aparta de mí ese cáliz, who was 28 years old at the time, was to be held for an unlimited length of time in a prison which inmates only left feet first or raving mad.

Not only does González Viaña tell the story of the four months the poet spent in Trujillo prison and the accompanying legal wrangles, he skilfully winds in and out of Vallejo’s life, from childhood until his death in Paris. Avoiding a boring chronological order, he describes the extraordinary characters he came across (friends, lovers and fellow prisoners) and those who tried to snatch his life from him.

A poet accursed, poor yet elegant, a Christian committed to the syndicalist struggle, Vallejo was involved in the creation of the first socialist party in a country that was reactionary, racist and corrupt.
A man whose life was devoid of a single anodyne or trivial moment, Vallejo was beset by misfortune, grasping at happiness only to watch it slip away time and time again.

Almost visual in quality – it would make wonderful material for a film – many of the scenes depicted in the novel remain etched in the reader’s eye.

Combining literary sensitivity with a meticulous search for numerous details of Vallejo’s life in the legal records of the time, the unpublished diary of his beloved Maria Sandoval and the revelations of his other sweetheart, Zoila Rosa Cuadra, who lived until 2000, Eduardo González Viaña has managed to penetrate the very soul of the poet.

César Vallejo’s poems have been translated into every language imaginable. Millions of copies of his works have been published, but not one single biographical novel has been written. This is the first.

Foreign Rights sold to:
- Edizioni Gorée (Italy)

El corrido de Dante
(Arte Público Press, USA, 2006 / Alfaqueque Ediciones, Spain, 2008)

International Latino Book Award 2007
Nominated for the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

In this novel González Viaña tells the metaphoric tale of Latin American immigration to the United States. Dante, the central character, is a Mexican who travels across the country in a ramshackle van with a donkey called Virgil for company. Virgil listens quietly unperturbed as Dante reminisces about his arrival in the United States and his blissful love for Beatriz, now dead.

Spanish is the language spoken throughout Dante’s odyssey across the United States where he encounters a string of eccentric characters like the Noble Couple, who read horoscopes on the radio and sell amulets, or Juan Pablo, a computer whizz-kid who uses his know-how to rob a casino in Las Vegas and pay his way through university.

Fate and dire need make him form a balladeer duo with The Pilgrim, a singer who’s crossed the border so many times through underground tunnels that the damp, death-like smell of the soil still clings to his skin.

The novel bustles with many other characters, including an old shepherd who has his own peculiar conception of society as a huge horse corral – even Adam and Eve fit into his view of things –where Latinos are a wonder of a breed.

Moving from surprise to surprise, the novel comes to an amazing end, revealing in the process an unknown face of the United States “where people already dream in Spanish, do business in a little English, dance in Portuñol and switch back to Spanish for lovemaking”, to echo the words of Alberto Ruy-Sánchez when reviewing the novel.

Foreign Rights sold to:
- Arte Público Press (USA), Dante's ballad, October 2007
- Edizioni Gorée (Italy), La ballata di Dante, November 2007
- Alfaqueque Ediciones (Spain), El corrido de Dante, March 2008
- Planeta (Peru), El corrido de Dante, August 2008
- Mono i Manjana (Serbia): to be published in 2010

Los sueños de América (Alfaguara, Peru, 2000)

The majority of the short stories in this collection are a symbol of the phenomenon of Hispanic migration to the United States. The opening story tells the tale of a family who, unable to bring themselves to leave their donkey Porfirio behind, attempt to cross the border with donkey and all, managing to dodge the patrols.

In the Juan Rulfo award-winning "Siete noches en California" (Seven nights in California), Leonor, a woman from Guadalajara, manages to escape from her oppressive husband by fleeing to Los Angeles, but the all-powerful Leonidas Montes de Oca will not let his wife stay in California. In his eyes, she’s his private property. Because his powerful tentacles don’t stretch as far as the United States, he hires a shaman to give her seven nightmares and make her come back.

Another story tells of a Cuban woman in her eighties who sets off from Havana to reach the United States in a raft, but she’s no ordinary balsera. All she takes with her is an image of Saint Barbara to avert the perils of a storm which threatens to destroy Florida and the business of her beloved son, Ivan.

In “La mujer de la frontera” (The Frontier Woman), an elderly woman crosses the last hill of Tijuana before creeping into the United States with her terminally ill son, determined to find a cure for his disease.

“A magnificent testimony of the Latin American presence in the United States.”
Mario Vargas Llosa

“The prose is so perfect that one wants to sing while one reads it.”

Alfredo Bryce Echenique

Foreign Rights sold to:

Arte Público Press (USA), American Dreams ,2005

Sarita Colonia viene volando
(Mosca Azul Editores, Peru, 1990 / Petroperú, Edición de homenaje, Peru, 2004)

Sarita Colonia is a saint begot of necessity, a saint born of the hopes and kindled by the imagination of the poorest of Peru. A flesh-and-blood saint (1924–1940) who twenty years after her death started to attract devotees amongst the more underprivileged strata of Peruvian society: the jobless, street vendors, prostitutes, petty thieves. In the 1990s, her following spread to the Latin Americans who cross the border illegally into the United States.

Eduardo González Viaña has crafted an imagined biography from the testimony and dreams of her devotees. In the book, Sarita Colonia, who died fifty years ago, comes back to life. As she flies across the skies of Peru, fantasy knows no limits: two women whisper under the water, a dead man sings, roses turn into ghosts and the solar system threatens to vanish. Reality knows no limits either: in an underground sky, the sky of the poor, the saint converses with the missing and the denizens of communal graves.

Illegal immigrants usually carry a scapular sown into the seams of their clothes containing a holy picture of Sarita. Some now also carry a photo of the cover of the book, which was published in Peru (1990).