Hernán Rivera Letelier picks up the Alfaguara Literary Prize for his novel El arte de la resurrección

In 2005, Hernan Rivera Letelier traveled to Madrid to give a talk at the Casa de America. His stay coincided with the awarding of the Alfaguara Literary Prize to Graciela Montes and Ema Wolf for El turno del escriba, and the Chilean novelist attended the ceremony. When a fellow Chilean saw him leaning against a column at the Santillana headquarters, he asked him what he was doing. "Getting the lay of the land," was his reply.

Five years on, it seems that his reconnaissance mission has been successful and the Antofagasta author yesterday picked up his own Alfaguara Prize for El arte de la resurrección (The Art of the resurrection), the story of Dominic Zarate Vega, the Christ of Elqui, who in the 1940s preached about the imminent end of the world throughout the Chilean desert, the "shroud of salt" where Hernan Rivera Letelier has lived since he was three months old.

In addition to the 130,000 euros prize money and a commemorative sculpture by Martín Chirino, Rivera also took home yesterday the online edition of the novel within the eBook reader presented to him by Ignacio Polanco, president of Grupo PRISA. Alfaguara has thus becomes the biggest literary prize in Spain to be published in that format. The eBook version will be available to readers at the end of this month on the Libranda platform, promoted by Santillana, Planeta and Random House Mondadori, and will be officially launched a few days later, on June 8, during the Madrid Book Fair.

After Manuel Vicent, the jury president, praised the sensorial skill of his style - "every page is edible, you can breathe in every word, which then passes through the lungs, and into your imagination and thought" - Hernán Rivera Letelier took the podium to give an improvised speech that began with a confession: "I have the strange sensation of being an imposter, that I'm stealing from someone, that at any given moment an Alfaguara executive will prod me on the shoulder, find me out and send me packing home, back to my desert. "

The Atacama Desert - "my Comala, my Macondo, my Santa Maria," he said, referring to the imaginary territories created by Rulfo, García Márquez and Onetti- has taken centre stage in the work of Hernan Rivera. Born in Talca, in southern Chile, in July 1950, he was still a baby when he moved to the inhospitable north, where he spent 30 years working as a laborer in the nitrate mines. It was before the Germans invented synthetic nitrate and the Chilean Pampa subsequently became an open grave of open-pit mining for the nearly 300 villages that once thrived in the region. Today only one remains.

"We're the ones who cannot wander the streets of our childhoods, because they no longer exist" the prize-winning author often says. It was in one of these villages that the writer first heard the name of the hero of his novel. "You're more disheveled than the Christ of Elqui," his mother told him one afternoon after he'd come home from killing lizards and chasing swirls of sand in the desert. The character, to whom the poet Nicanor Parra also devoted two books of verse, soon made his way into his life and eventually into his books. First he settled down into half a page in La Reina Isabel cantaba rancheras, his first novel - "a novel of prostitutes " published in 1994 - and he then embarked on a voyage in Los trenes se van al purgatorio before featuring in several chapters in Mi nombre en Malarrosa. "I said to myself, this little Christ is after something," Rivera said. The result is this latest novel - "the first miracle of Christ" - which has earned him the Alfaguara Prize. "Nobody else in Chile could have written this story, not because I'm the best writer -which maybe I am -but because the way to tell it was in my genes: my father was a preacher and I grew up with a Bible under my pillow .

The Christ that moves through this unusual fifth gospel is, according to Hernán Rivera Letelier, a cross between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Divinely human and humanly divine, as the author describes him. "I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds good, doesn't it?"

However the author did seem to know what he meant, as he continued: "A human Christ, the type I wish I could have found in the Bible, someone with a sense of humor and who would laugh at the jokes of his disciples and tell them: 'Wait, I'm going to pee behind those bushes'. "

In the novel we learn that the magic mirror to see "the ugly turn pretty"  and "the crazy turn sane" has a name: money. Thanks to money, a madman becomes "eccentric" and an ugly woman, is transformed into "a rare, exotic beauty." Now, since yesterday, Rivera Letelier has 130,000 reasons, in euros, to turn his hardened miner's face into the face of a successful historic novelist.

Source: EL PAÍS

Further information

Talks and 'pisco' under the sun (in Spanish)