Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City by Alicia Yanez Cossio. Evanston. 1999. Northwestern University Press. 0810114089. Translated from the Spanish by Kenneth J. A. Wishnia. 228 pages. hardcover. Jacket image: Linda S. Wingerter, White Dog in the Piazza. Jacket design: Toni Ellis.
DESCRIPTION - BRUNA AND HER SISTERS IN THE SLEEPING CITY is the first novel by Ecuador's foremost woman writer, Alicia Yánez Cossio. Available in English for the first time, this magical novel chronicles the history of Bruna and her wealthy, eccentric family. A family with a centuries-long history in northern Ecuador, Bruna's ancestors lived in ‘the sleeping city,' a somnolent hamlet tucked into the place in the mountains where the winds change directions and create the sleep-inducing mountain ‘sickness' called soroche. Bruna's past is dominated by her deceased ancestors, by the ghosts and scandals that linger in the old family home. Her living relatives spend most of their waking hours reassembling the family tree, appropriating and casting off relatives at will, with impoverished Indian ancestors changed to royalty and back again in the space of a single conversation. As she pieces together her family history through a number of colorful characters, including her beautiful and wealthy Indian grandmother Maria Illacatu, the wild and flighty Aunt Camelia the Tearful, and Uncle Alvarito, the adult child-genius who devoted his life to weaving a carpet for the pope intended to stretch from the sleeping city to Rome, Bruna begins to create her own identity, emerging from the shadow of history and coming to grips with the struggles of her family and nation to achieve a balance between the best of the old and the new. At first glance a rollicking tale full of the outrageous adventures of Bruna's relatives, Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City is much more. Tracing the complete history
of Ecuador from the Conquest through the 1970s, it is a seriocomic examination of the tensions and conflicts inherent in a world that wavers between tradition and change, between an oppressive colonial past and a modern society obsessed with material gain.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ALICIA YANEZ COSSIO was born December 10, 1928 and is considered to be one of Ecuador's principal novelists. Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City is the first of her novels to be translated into English. KENNETH J. A. WISHNIA is a novelist who has taught at SUNY at Stony Brook and Queens College CUNY.
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