num_pages: 103
description: Published in 1928 to great acclaim when its author was just twenty years old, The Cardboard House is sweeping and passionate. The novel presents a series of flashes — scenes, moods, dreams, and weather — as the narrator wanders through Barranco (then an exclusive seaside resort outside Lima). In one stunning passage after another, he skips from reveries of first loves, South Pole explorations, and ocean tides to precise and unashamed notations of class and of race: from an Indian woman "with her hard, shiny, damp head of hair — a mud carving" to a gringo gobbling "synthetic milk, canned meat, hard liquor."As the translator notes, The Cardboard House is as "subversive now as when it was written: Adán's uncompromising poetic vision and the trueness and poetry of his voice constitute a heroic act against cultural colonialism."
language: English
title: The Cardboard House
titlecomplete: The Cardboard House (A Palabra Sur Book)
genres: Literature, Classics, Literary Fiction, Novels, Latin American, Latin American Literature, Spanish Literature, Fiction, Poetry, The Americas
ratings_count: 445
places: Lima, Peru
awards: awardedAt: 1357027200000
name: PEN Translation Prize
category: Katherine Silver
publisher: Graywolf Pr