The novels of Salvador Garmendia :

Abstract

This study is divided into four main parts in which the five novels of Venezuelan Salvador Garmendia are analyzed on the bases of theme, characterization, structure and style. The novels are Los pequenos seres (1959), Los habitantes (1961), D(')ia de cenzia (1963), La mala vida (1968) and Los pies de barro (1973).

The novels of Salvador Garmendia are thematically homogeneous. Although they take place in different barrios of Caracas, they are similar in their portrayal of the anguish of modern city life. Garmendia recreates the traditional Venezuelan protagonist into an alienated and frustrated antihero. This character demonstrates both individual and universal qualities to the most intimate details. Garmendia's unmasking of his ironic heroes reveals the emptiness, lack of direction or meaning in life and the mediocrity of modern man's existence.

The structue of Garmendia's novels is an original adaptation of contemporary European and American techniques involving the assumption of reader complicity, simultaneity, interior monologue and cinematics. His style is typified by terseness, an unembellished prose, grotesque imagery and a consistently strong appeal to the senses.

Salvador Garmendia's authentic, original and sustained novelistic production has earned him the recognition of critics in bringing the Venezuelan narrative firmly into the mainstream of contemporary literature.

As a leader of the Sardio group after the fall of the Marcos Perez Jimenez dictatorship in 1958, Garmendia seeks to create a novel which parallels more adequately Venezuela's entrance into the mainstream of modern life. His influence helps to redefine the Venezuelan narrative by rejecting popular regional and socio-political themes, idealized type characters, primitive structural devices and rhetorical eloquence, la escritura bella.