Party in the Northwest

Author's name: Anna Maria Matute

Dingo, the puppeteer, hits a young child as it passes through the squalid village of Artemilla, from which he fled years earlier to join a troupe of acrobats, hoping to make his entire life a continuous festival. He turns to his old friend Juan Medinao for help with his predicament, but his encounter with the village chief ultimately awakens details of a painful past, and with them begins a relentless journey through memory, reliving his relationship with his father, his mother's suicide, and the mixture of hatred and love he felt for his half-brother. In this compact but powerful novel, Ana María Matute delves deep into the depths of her characters, exploring the deep scars childhood leaves on their souls. With penetrating insight and extreme sensitivity, she reveals the most complex and profound human emotions, in a dense narrative that allows feelings of inferiority, fear, isolation, and hatred to tell their own story.