Word: esteban
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Allende is not just an epigone of Garcia Marquez. Writing in the tradition of Latin America's magic realists, she has a singular talent for producing full- scale representational portraits with comic surreal touches. Her rendering of the Trueba patriarch Esteban and his wife Clara is a hilarious display of mismatching. While the crude, commonsensical Esteban is doomed by nature to cause constant offense to his wife, Clara the Clairvoyant irritates her spouse by her perpetual whispered concourse with the spirits...
...Esteban's efforts to please Clara prove disastrous. After their wedding he can think of nothing better to present to his bride than the hide of her beloved dead dog Barrabas, turned into a rug and laid out at the foot of the marriage bed. "His two glass eyes stared up at her with the helpless look that is the specialty of taxidermists." Esteban's insensitiveness toward his wife extends beyond the grave. When Clara dies, the inconsolable widower begins wearing a suede pouch hanging under his shirt. "In it were his wife's false teeth, which he treated...
From the highway, the people point to the hills where the guerrillas have their hiding places. At dawn one day earlier this month, some 200 guerrillas occupied the village of San Esteban Catarina, in San Vicente, about 25 miles from the capital. When I arrived there, prayers were being offered in the church for the return of 70 youths-between 13 and 21 years of age-who were carried off by the guerrillas. The local priest, Father René Valle, and several mothers tried to stop the guerrillas from taking the boys. "Before, they had many supporters here, and they...
...fact that 200 guerrillas occupied San Esteban Catarina for four hours without encountering any trouble gives an idea of the insurgents' operational power. Barely five minutes away, in San Lorenzo, there is a military barracks where they were not aware or did not choose to be aware of what was happening. When I arrived in San Lorenzo, I was impressed by the youth of the soldiers. Some, really just children, were playing beneath the luxuriant ceiba tree that shades the main square. "In theory the recruits are not younger than 16," says General Vides Casanova. "But in practice there...
Once the lights go out, it is still the 19th century as far as children and ghosts are concerned, reason enough for the perdurability of tales about phantoms, poltergeists and demons. A case in point: Esteban and the Ghost, adapted by Sibyl Hancock (Dial; $10.95). The hero, a wide-eyed tinker, plies his trade in the hills of Spain until he learns of a reward for anyone who can exorcise the ghost from a forbidding castle. The sprite can overwhelm anything except innocence, and Esteban not only survives but prevails. Together, he and the ghost recover some stolen treasure...