Caballero Calderón, Eduardo (1910–1993)

views updated

Caballero Calderón, Eduardo (1910–1993)

Eduardo Caballero Calderón (b. 6 March 1910; d. 3 April 1993), Colombian novelist and essayist. Author of more than two dozen books, Caballero Calderón is one of Colombia's major novelists of the twentieth century. He has also published numerous essays on literary, cultural, political, and historical topics. Caballero Calderón began writing in the 1940s and rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. His major novel, El buen salvaje (The Good Savage) appeared in 1966, receiving international acclaim in Spain and throughout the Hispanic world. His ten novels, four volumes of short stories, and eleven books of essays have placed him at the forefront of Colombian writers.

Caballero Calderón's earliest publications were essays. The first, a volume titled Tipacoque (1941), is a set of nostalgic portraits of rural, provincial life in Colombia. In his book of essays, Breviario del Quijote (1947), the author demonstrates the importance of Spanish literary tradition for him and for Latin American writers in general: he writes about his admiration for the Poema del Cid, Don Quijote, writings of the Spanish Golden Age, and other classic Spanish texts. For the remainder of his career, he remained closely aligned to the culture of Spain.

Caballero Calderón's early novels dealt with the Colombian civil war commonly known as La Violencia, a conflict that took place primarily from 1948 to 1958. Many interests were represented in this conflict, but the primary antagonists were the traditional Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. In his novel El Cristo de espaldas (1952; Christ on His Back) a son in the Liberal Party is accused of killing his father of the Conservative Party, and the town priest becomes the sacrificial victim when he attempts to justify the son's act. The protagonist of Siervo sin tierra (1954) is also a victim of La Violencia. The basic thesis of the novel Manuel Pacho (1962) is that each person has one opportunity in life to be a hero. In El buen salvaje, Caballero Calderón rises above local stories of violence and constructs a self-conscious fiction about a young Latin American intellectual in Paris.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leon Lyday and Luis Carlos Herrera et al., "Trayectoria de un novelista: Eduardo Caballero Calderón," in Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico 12, no. 2 (1969): 13-103.

John S. Brushwood, The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth-Century Survey (1975).

Seymour Menton, La novela colombiana: Planetas y satélites (1977).