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by Manuel Corleto (Author)
Audacious, provocative, iconoclastic, with elements of the carnavalesque, the erotic, irreverence toward the institutions that have governed and continue to govern Guatemalan society, With Every Drop of Blood from the Wound breaks with the traditional concepts of the Latin American novel and magical realism to challenge the reader to grapple with fragmented chronology and intersecting textuality in the discordant and inverted world of Gerona, a fictitious semi-urban neighborhood in which Corleto projects a violent and often strange picture that serves as a microcosm of the corruption, failures, and evils of his country. His portrayal of sex, at times crude and violent, is not gratuitous, but rather serves to make a point: that in the end the only enduring and worthwhile value is love, love raised to its highest sense: the human need for each other, the need of family, of belonging, the need of warmth.
The story is set during the second half of the twentieth century, in the late 40s and early 50s, with reference to the dictatorship of General Ubico (1931-44), and unfolds in the fictional barrio of Gerona, located near a railroad yard where the two protagonists--Gabriel and Willy--carry out their adolescent games in the abandoned railway cars, including their first sexual encounters, thanks to the very willing and precocious García sisters. Later the two boys finally go their separate ways, but years later are reunited when they are grown men, when their boyhood illusions and dreams have faded, and they are resigned to facing the hard reality of their individual failures. Still the human being survives despite his lack of ideals. From this perspective, With Every Drop of Blood from the Wound--the words from a song at the end of the book that Corleto wrote to underscore the pain of lost dreams and the plaintive cry of a people ruled by the iron fist of repressive rulers--paradoxically is, when all is said and done, an affirmation of life, hop
