| El Conquistador (The conqueror) blurbs
The author of The anatomist, The merciful women and City of heretics, among other successful novels, unfolds in The conqueror a plentiful imagination that, with a narrative skill, catches the reader attention: Andahazi, who win with this novel the Planeta Prize (Argentina) 2006, has an unquestionable talent to think up the structure, the development and the rhythm of the plot, giving verisimilitude to its characters and liveliness to their acts.
The conqueror is a historical fable whose story is shown in a witty and distorted way; is also a love and hate story, a heroism and cruelty one, in which reality and fantasy both get together. Each chapter gives a new episode, an always different fact that stamps a zing to the action and increases the reader’s interest; an interest caused, in addition, for the many surprises of its original plot.
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Andahazi uses that literary trick that we call fantasy to make us reflect about history, culture and also about our humanity that have hesitated in every time and in everywhere between light and darkness, heroism and meanness, virtue and greed. The novel, with its skillful plot and its sad and dramatic ending, can be consider the portrait, in an ironic tone, of the ambitions, believings and feelings that, maybe, have not changed much over the centuries. Despite all this The conqueror can be read, also, as an engaging adventure novel.
Antonio Requeni, La Nación
Since he become a controversial author with his first novel, The anatomist (translated into thirty languages), the writer Federico Andahazi didn’t stop achieving success and increasing the number of his readers, who are nowadays a crowd of fans more and more loyal.
(The conqueror) is built in a tree parts plot: in the first one, the customs and rituals of aztec society are described, this portrait needed an investigation work by the autor; in the second one, the great trip Quetza makes to Europe is told and the base of this tale are the letters the traveller send to his girlfriend from childhood, when he felt afraid to met the other side of the Atlantic natives.
Tomás Ortiz, Mira. (Madrid)
An intense, interesting and beautiful novel. (…)
La voz de Galicia (España)
The conqueror is an original novel in which Federico Andahazi exposes the meeting between the old and the new world, in a backward narrative way.
Diario Correo español
With a narrative style that remember us the oral tales in front of a bonfire, Federico Andahazi revive a hole world in this magic novel. An disappear world of drums and flutes, of flowered islands, of red canoes, green and yellow, and also a land of bloody sacrifices and fanatical priests.
Andahazi has built a magnificent epic tale, a classic epopey that shows the essence of the human being.
El latinoamericano (España)
Time to time a contemporary novel is able to approach science fiction land without falling in it, going near the space we can call imaginary story. Federico Andahazi is the main character of one of those rare trips with The conqueror.
His best shot is to propose a non European point of view about the mutual discovery of people from Spain and America, without falling in tendencies.
Juan Manuel González, Diario Córdoba. (España)
A real lesson that can still be applied in many places of the world, some of them situated in America, where natives died of hunger while men from remotes lands get rich with his natural resources.
Faro de Murcia (España)
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