Author: Gamboa, Jeremias.
Publisher: Alfaguara
Pages:976
A thirty-three-year-old man returns to his native Peru and feels lost: he has no partner, friends, money or work, or the slightest idea of where his life his headed. He holes up in his mother’s house in the neighborhood he left years ago, vowing never to return. There he experiences a whirlwind of memories, exacerbated by the reappearance of an old friend and the teacher who taught him to read and write. The resulting revelations, while painful, begin to unravel the emotional knot he’s been carrying inside him: the ghosts of his origins, the terror that held sway over the country during his childhood, the shame of being an impoverished public-school student, the hardships of rural Andean life, and his discovery of social and racial injustice. The Beginning of the World is a personal and family memoir, a brutally frank dissection of twentieth-century Peruvian society. At the same time, it is a moving tribute to the essential role of teachers and a wrenching love letter to the protagonist’s mother. In this complex and ambitious work, Jeremías Gamboa expands his personal universe and pays homage to the Latin American novel as a tool for naming reality.