(A classic Ngaio Marsh novel which features blood-curdling...)
A classic Ngaio Marsh novel which features blood-curdling murders in the confines of a riverboat, the Zodiac, cruising through Constable country. 'He looks upon the murders that he did in fact perform as tiresome and regrettable necessities,' reflected Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn on the international crook known as 'the Jampot'. But it was Alleyn's wife Troy who knew 'the Jampot' best: she had shared close quarters with him on the tiny pleasure steamer Zodiac on a cruise along the peaceful rivers of 'Constable country'. And it was she who knew something was badly wrong even before Alleyn was called in to solve the two murders on board...
Mario Roberto Morales is a Guatemalan author of prize-winning novels that have earned him international acclaim. He is one of the major exponents of the nueva novela (New Novel) in Central American fiction; his work combines the experimental nature of Latin American fiction of the 1960s with autobiographical recountings of the political and social situation in the region.
Background
Mario Morales was born on November 21, 1960, in the capital city of Guatemala. When he was one year old, his family moved to Santa Lucia Cotzumalgupa on the southern coast of Guatemala. His father, a wealthy businessman, owned a pharmacy, and the two were close; according to Ann Gonzalez in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Morales called his father his best friend and "accomplice," and Gonzales wrote that although his father was not educated, he was "a profound, wise, and good man." He died in an automobile accident when Morales was nineteen.
Education
Morales went to an American high school where he was relatively isolated from exposure to social problems or political insurrection in his country. Morales began attending a Jesuit college, Universidad Rafael Landivar.
In Costa Rica, he earned a master's degree in sociology at the Universidad de Costa Rica. He received also Ph.D at the University of Pittsburgh in 1998.
Mario's first novel Los demonios salvajes is based on the innocent, irresponsible period of his high school years. This work won the Premio Unico Centroamericano de Novela de la Direccion General de Cultura у Bellas Artes in 1977. In the book, the first-person narrator is an adolescent boy who lives through the armed resistance in Guatemala, beginning with an attempted coup on November 13, 1960, leading through a decade of fighting, and ending with the death of the rebels. The narrator is insulated from events by his middle-class background, the safety of school, and his teenage distractions of drinking, girlfriends, and rock and roll music. The novel questions how someone becomes socially and politically aware, particularly someone who, like the narrator, is protected by his social status from being affected by inequality and injustice. In addition, Morales asks how such a privileged person deals with the guilt of seeing injustice and doing nothing about it.
In 1970 Morales and his friends decided to write a novel without plot, in which nothing happened, and in which the reader would be free to find connections and make any number of patterns. This work was Morales's first novel, Obraje (Work), all copies of which were believed to be lost in 1982, when Morales left Guatemala and his books and papers were taken by the Guatemalan military. One copy was later found, however: Morales had sent it to a professor at the University of Bristol, so it escaped destruction.
Morales was politically active in Guatemala until 1973, when he received a scholarship to study art history in Italy. Although he lived abroad, he continued his connections with the guerrilla movement in Guatemala.
In 1982 a revolutionary group that he was associated with sent him to Mexico on a two-week mission. Mexican authorities arrested him, sent him to jail, and then deported him to Costa Rica, events he describes in his second novel. El esplendor de la piramide. He could not return to Guatemala, so the revolutionary group to which he belonged assigned him to go to Nicaragua and form an international coalition to support the struggle in Guatemala.
In Nicaragua Morales ran into trouble when various revolutionary groups disagreed and he was accused of trafficking in gold to fund the Contras, a charge that could be punished with death. He was imprisoned for four months, an experience that was worse for him than his imprisonment in Mexico, since this time people who were supposed to be on his side had betrayed him. As Gonzalez notes in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "In Mexico he had been tortured physically, but since the blows came from the enemy he fell ideologically strong enough to withstand the punishment." In prison, in addition to the deep sense of loss and betrayal, he was subjected to darkness, silence, lies about the outside world, threats of death, hunger, thirst, and a loss of any sense of time. When he was finally released, he stayed in Nicaragua for two more months, then went to see his daughters in Costa Rica, where he decided to stay. In Costa Rica, he worked as a translator. By 1992 conditions in Guatemala had improved, and he was able to return there and help in the process of making the country more democratic. However, in 1993, his name was on a list of twenty-four people known as "subversives" and he was threatened with assassination.
Morales's writings have begun to gain notice outside of Central America, and some of his works have been translated into English. Latin-American critic Seymour Menton wrote extensively about Morales's early writings in Historia critica de la novela guatemalteca (1985), and so did John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman in Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions (1990). All of these authors acknowledge the deep connection between Morales's political views and his writing.
Morales has noted that he has been influenced by many writers, both Latin American and American, particularly John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, and William Faulkner.
In 1999, he published a collection of essays entitled La articulación de las diferencias o el síndrome de Maximón. In 2000, his Face of the Earth, Heart of the Sky was published in English. As of 2007, he taught in the department of Modern Languages at the University of Northern Iowa.
Guatemalan novelist, poet, and critic Mario Roberto Morales is one of the leading representatives of the nueva novela (New Novel) in Central American fiction. He combines the linguistic, temporal, and structural experimentation of the Latin-American Boom fiction of the 1960s with testimonial/autobiographical accounts of the political and social turmoil of the region. His prize-winning novels have attracted national and international critical attention, and some of his work has already been translated into English, a sure sign of his growing importance in Central American letters. In 2007, he won the National Miguel Angel Asturias Literature Prize.
When Morales began attending a Jesuit college, Universidad Rafael Landivar, he became a member of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR, Armed Rebel Forces). In addition to his leftist political involvement, he was also becoming aware of current literature, particularly the growth of experimental writing in Latin American countries.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Gonzalez noted, "What separates Morales's fiction from the stream of political and social denunciations pouring out of Latin America... is his creative genius, his sophisticated manipulation of language and narrative strategies, his ideological commitment to the revolutionary struggle in Guatemala, and his ability to capture the pervasive humor of daily life amid an overwhelming sense of frustration and defeat."
Interests
Writers
John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, William Faulkner
Connections
In 1970 Mario began living with a woman, and they had two daughters, Mayari and Anais, but his intensely militant stand on politics led them to be separated in 1980.
