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Javier Campus. Los saltimbanquis. Santiago, Chile. Red Internacional del Libro. 1999. 186 pages. ISBN 956284-078-6.
Among the striking images that frequent Javier Campos's first novel, Los saltimbanquis, perhaps the most central depicts the dwarf-poet Justo hitting the side of a prison cell during his interrogation by a captain in the Chilean military, an act which leaves the bells on his tiny jester's shoes ajingle. Campos's poetic vision, from La ciudad en llamas (1986) to EI astronauta en llamas, a finalist in the Casa de las Americas Prize competition for 1998, has sketched out a world where globalization distances love, as in the conceit of the spaceman who remembers what he left behind, especially in the wake of the economic success / psychic wound of the Pinochet dictatorship. Within the same genealogy, Los saltimbanquis works on a more circumscribed scale: the clash of a circus with a righteous...