Book launch "The expropriation"

In La expropriación, the first novel by journalist Rodrigo Miranda (Santiago, 1974), he puts into action all the symbolism and epic characteristic of the Popular Unity as the linguistic material of his narrative, and the episode of the construction of the aforementioned building as the narrative pretext of a novel that is introduced into the bowels of one of the milestones of that political and social project that brought together an important part of the population.

In short chapters arranged as a countdown of the progress of construction, Miranda elaborates a citizen epic that ignored the tragedy that was beginning to cloud the revolutionary sky with powerful and well-crafted scenes (chapters) loaded with meaning. A country in black and white that still preserved a collective idea raised by a leader who sought to install the flag of dignity in a land of the humiliated. Those who felt and made the feat their own were summoned, those who "turned wheelbarrows, carried, pushed, sweated. They straightened and welded the structures like machines (...). Together, they raised the roof following a plan. The workers raised the steel beams of the roof on 16 concrete pillars (...). The undertaking was enormous, impossible. One floor every 50 hours." And there, in the middle of the task, a couple of workers will conceive “the new man”, that semantic grandiloquence that degenerated (and also degenerates at the end of the novel) into what we know today as “the average Chilean”, that composition – ethical and moral – amorphous, that entelechy fractured and divorced from any political epic.

Rodrigo Miranda was born in Santiago de Chile in 1974. He studied Journalism at the University of Santiago and has a Master's Degree in Creative Writing from New York University. His journalistic articles have been published in newspapers and magazines in Chile and the United States. The Expropriationis his first novel.

Source: Communications and Report Reviews