Desmoronamiento
This text is a summary of the essay on Desmoronamiento in German.
Fiona Schmidt
The following article summarizes the latest novel Desmoronamiento (2006, Tusquets Editores, Barcelona) by the Salvadoran-Honduran author Horacio Castellanos Moya. The book tells the story of the only daughter of a political leader of Honduras, who marries a Salvadorian communist. She lives with her husband in San Salvador in the time of the football war and is regularly verbally attacked by her mother, who wants her to return to Honduras. The daughter only returns to Honduras, where her mother lives, when the old woman is dying. The story is told in three parts and in each one, the author uses another narrative technique: the first part confronts the reader with a screenplay-like scene between the political leader and his wife; the second part is the correspondence between the political leader and his daughter, written in times of war and uprising; the third part is written from the perspective of a servant of the old lady and how he experiences her last days of life. This text places the novel in the row of critical and sometimes aggressive novels, which continue to tell the story of the Aragón family, which began with the novel Donde no estén Ustedes.
