INDIANA, RITA
Asmodeus, an ancient demon with waning powers, abandons the body of the forty-something rocker in which he has been living for decades to look for a younger one. In that eventful journey, which leads the ill-fated Asmodeus to bounce from one guest to another, a complex plot is put together that immerses us in the motley emotional territory of Santo Domingo in 1992: from the local heavy metal scene to the house of an extorturer at the service of the Balaguer dictatorship. The infernal lives of humans thus become entangled with the crazy machinations of angels and demons in this hallucinated chronicle of a piece of Dominican history. Comedy put together from a skein of tragedies, metal opera in exquisite tenths, Asmodeo sounds like Héctor Lavoe and Black Sabbath, but also like picaresque and Siglo de Oro. Quevedian and Calderonian to the core, this novel demonstrates that the Diablo Cojuelo took up residence in the Afro-Antillean Caribbean. With a unique style in which the most radical gestures coexist with a serene classicism, Asmodeo confirms that Rita Indiana is one of the fundamental authors of contemporary Latin American literature.
