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Teresa Ruiz Rosas Peru
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Teresa Ruiz Rosas was born in Arequipa,
Peru in 1956. She studied literature and linguistics in Arequipa, Budapest,
Barcelona and Freiburg and was a finalist for the 1994 Premio Herralde de
Novela and the 1999 Juan Rulfo prize for short stories, awarded by
the Instituto Cervantes in Paris. Alongside her writing, she also translates
German and Hungarian literature into Spanish. Ruiz Rosas lives in Cologne.
The novel La mujer cambiada (“The Altered
Woman”) is set in Lima at the end of the 1990s. The attractive Elvira Peña
turns up at the most prestigious beauty clinic on the square with an unusual
request: she insists that they alter her face so radically that no one will
recognise her. The clinic's assistant manager Gerardo Bustíos, used to simply
improving and rejuvenating his clients is confused. But he agrees to Elvira's
request, because he finds her fascinating. She tells him of her plans for a
clinic for people who urgently need treatment but can't afford to pay for it.
This touches a sore point in him, as the dull routine of the beauty clinic has
taken him far away from his ideals, and he finds himself trying to persuade his
patients against surgery, which so enrages the management that they consider
suspending him.
Bustíos decides to set up the clinic Cara a Cara (Face
to Face) along with Elvira, treating victims of accidents and violent attacks.
Celebrating the clinic's second anniversary, one of the guests, a former
lieutenant, recognises Elvira Peña as the lover of the scientist Felipe
Arréstegui, who disappeared many years ago. Elvira, whose real name is
Etelvina, had been trying in vain for years to find out what happened to
Felipe. Finally, she had to assume that the terrorist organisation Sendero Luminoso
(Shining Path) had kidnapped and killed him, and she lived in permanent fear of
being abducted herself. She was just as scared of her increasingly violent
ex-husband, and decided to adapt a new identity. The former lieutenant reveals
the terrible truth: it was not Sendero Luminoso that tortured and killed her
lover, but the military – on behalf of her vengeful exhusband.
Set against a love story between the poverty-stricken
Felipe and the well-situated Elvira, who marries a man of her class to please her
parents, Teresa Ruiz Rosas takes the reader into a dark chapter of Peruvian
history, marked by the hate and violence of a long civil war with consequences
lasting to the present day. Yet the skilled author has also written an engaging
and entertaining book.
Novels:
El copista
Barcelona: Anagrama 1994, 126 p.
German: Ammann
1996
Netherlands: Wereldbibliothek
1998
La falaz posteridad
Lima (Peru only): Ed. San Marcos 2007, 368 p.
La mujer cambiada
Lima(Peru only): Ed. San Marcos 2008, 164 p.
Germany: Ralf Liebe Verlag
Wer fragt
schon nach 'Kuhle Wampe.'
Von der Liebe und anderen Gemeinheiten
Weilerswist: Ralf Liebe Verlag 2008, 320 p.
Stories:
El desván
Arequipa: La Campana Catalina 1989, 112 p.
German:Gallucci Verlag 1990
Detrás de la Calle Toledo
Lima: Antares Artes & Letras 2004, 84 p.
(trilingual: English, German, Spanish)
Das Porträt hat Dich geblendet
Bonn: Free Pen Verlag 2005, 192 p.
(bilingual: German, Spanish)