Translation Rights TQE / The Captain of the Sleeping

Mayra Montero, already consecrated by the critics and the public, has enriched our catalogue ever since 1991. Each of her novels has the capacity of revealing a different world, without deviating from a particular literary journey, very much her own, whose voice is unmistakable. With El Capitán de los Dormidos she surprises us once again with her capacity to transmit what can not be transmitted literally.

It is October 1950. Andrés Yasín is a twelve-year-old boy that lives in the Puerto Rican island of Vieques and who faces a double tragedy: on one hand, the nationalist revolt in which his father —the owner of a beach hotel— partakes, whose bloody outcome will mark his family forever; on the other hand, the sudden death of his mother. Only one man, John Timothy Bunker, an American aviator, a regular at the hotel, can explain the truth about a certain monstrous image that Andrés has seen, or has believed to see. Andrés and John, who the boy once baptized as Captain of the Sleeping, finally meet up in Santa Cruz, the largest of the Virgin Islands, fifty years after those events. From the conversation between them, from their mutual confessions, surfaces the true key of a story of love and regret: an old passion that remits to death, and that only from death can be understood and forgiven.

Mayra Montero was born in Havana in 1952, and currently lives in Puerto Rico. In the last few years, she has been investigating and writing several essays about Afrocaribbean religions, with special emphasis on voodoo, which fascinated the great French thinker and author of true classics of erotic literature, Georges Bataille. Montero worked for ten years as a jounalist, then as a correspondent in several countries of Central America and the Caribbean, and after that as an editor. In 1987 she published her first novel, La trenza de la hermosa luna (The Braid of the Beautiful Moon). She has also published a book of short stories, Veintitrés y una tortuga (Twenty-three and a Turtle) and many other short stories which are published in various compilations. Tusquets Editores has published: El rojo de su sombra (The Red of His Shadow), Tú la oscuridad (You, Darkness), Como un mensajero tuyo (As Your Messenger), and El Capitán de los Dormidos (The Captain of the Sleeping) all of which have contributed to her success as a novelist.