Cristina Peri Rossi

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Cristina Peri Rossi (born November 12, 1941) is an Uruguayan novelist, poet, and author of short stories.

Considered a leading light of the post-1960s period of prominence of the Latin-American novel, she has written more than 37 works. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and left the country in 1972, moving to Spain, where she became a citizen in 1975. As of 2005 she lives in Barcelona. She studied at the University of Montevideo.

[edit] Works

La nave de los locos (The Ship of Fools) (1984) is generally regarded by critics as Peri Rossi's most important work. It is an experimental novel which takes the form of a pastiche of travel writing. The protagonist, Equis, is a misfit whose travels to a number of deliberately vague locations. By inviting the reader to see modern society through the eyes of Equis, Peri Rossi is using the technique of defamiliarisation to produce a biting satire of today's world. This includes a strong dose of feminism: Equis eventually renounces his own sexuality, declaring that there is "harmony in impotence", which can be read as a denouncement of patriarchial and phallogocentric society. More generally, the work shows toleration and arguably even idealisation of sexualities that have been traditionally considered dissident, including gerontophilia and controversially, in the character Morris' love for a ten-year-old boy, pedophilia. The novel exposes the dangers of arbitrary dictatorial government in its inclusion an emotional depiction of a concentration camp in a country which remains unspecified, but which could be based on any of the various Latin American dictatorships of the latter half of the twentieth century. The title of the book is taken from the Ship of Fools legend, which is reworked by Peri Rossi in the novel itself. The novel shows sympathy for those condemned to the ship of fools and there is a clear parallel between this medieval episode and the modern-day the aforementioned concentration camp passage.

The themes established in La nave de los locos are ones which Rossi revisits in other works. Her latest novels include Solitario de amor (Solitaire of Love) (1989), La última noche de Dostoievski (Dostoyevsky's Last Night) (1992) and El amor es una droga dura (Love is a hard drug) (1999). All of these novels are formally less experimental than Nave. They deal with male protagonists who, like Equis, gradually explore their sexualities, discovering that they have to renounce traditional gender roles both in sexual behaviour and in the real world to find fulfilment. However, there is little political commentary in these novels.

Peri Rossi has also produced an impressive amount of poetry, again covering many of the ideas outlined above. The lesbian eroticism of Evohé (1971) caused a scandal when first released.