In This Sacred Place
Poli Delano
Translated by John J. Hassett & Philip Metzidakis

$16.00 240 pages ISBN 1-893996-59-X

sample [PDF]

Gabriel Canales, raised in the countryside, has come to Santiago to attend university and seek his fortune. He soon falls into a pattern of partying, but when he kills a man, he's forced to flee. The police rule the
death an accident, and given a fresh start, he returns to the city, where fate hands him Teresa, a political activist who awakens Gabriel to the reality of what has been happening in Chile while he was partying his life away. Now, he finds himself somehow locked in the men's room of a downtown movie house. With nothing
better to do, he creates a movie of his mind. "Rolling at a given speed the film of your own lifexperiences and see them projected onto the screen of your
astonished mind," he tells us. But he's about to be even more astonished: the gunshots he hears aren't coming from a movie.

Poli Delano was born in Madrid, Spain and grew up in Chile. With the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973, he, like thousands of Chileans, was forced into exile. He returned to Chile twelve years later and now lives in Santiago, where he continues to write. His work has won many prestigious literary awards in Latin America, and his novels and short stories have been published in Mexico, Europe, Canada, and throughour
Latin America. This is his first work to appears in English.

"Poli Délano's novel is the daring metaphor of a
tremendous social crisis in Latin America. The
brutality of its graffiti embodied by the hero caught
with his pants down is, without a doubt, one of the
most surprising attempts by a Latin American author to
parody Yankee comic strips about triumphant heroes on
horseback, on space ships or in tanks belonging to a
two-bit Pentagon."
-Fernando Alegría - author of The New Latin
American Novel

"Inserted within a specific temporal and spatial
framework: Santiago, Chile, September 1973, this novel
is without a doubt, one of our most significant
portrayals of the convulsive environment that is
today's Latin America. Its appearance enriches the
already existent saga achieved by such works as
Portable Country (González León), A Manual for Manuel
(Cortázar) and Conversation in the Cathedral (Vargas
Llosa), to name just a few."
-Ariel Muniz - Plural, Mexico

We needed this novel. The brutal fascist assault
against the Chilean people has provoked an endless
array of studies, essays and even defenses of such
behavior. But we really needed to have in our hands
this fresh, ironic narrative text filled with more
comprehension than hatred and resentment towards a
sector of Santiago's politicized middle class which,
with its romantic escapades, its problems, its
confidence in the future, had to confront a reality
that was deteriorating day by day before its very
eyes.
-Fausto Castillo - El Día, Mexico