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A Coastal Sailor in Search of Freedom |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / FEATURED BOOK: Napoleon Baccino Ponce de Leon's Five Black Ships |
| Author: Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 10/1/1994 |
| Size: 3,238 Words, 18,179 Characters |
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Napoleon Baccino Ponce de Leon brings Ferdinand Magellan to life in his magnificent novel Five Black Ships, for which he received the Novela Casa de las Americas award in 1989. By Magellan's side, Juanillo Ponce, the court jester and the author's alter ego, who bears one of Baccino's last names, entertains and, at the same time, speaks out in judgment of man's inhumanity to man. Through the poetic voice of that sole fictitious character in his novel, Baccino creates a bridge between the past and present and explores the human condition.
As we talked, I felt drawn into a world of magic that erased the boundaries between fiction and history. Baccino spoke of the many voices that inhabit him. He considers himself a "mestizo" who looks like a northern European. He spoke of his commitment to freedom, brought about by years of oppression, and his reverence for writing, which he views as a constant apprenticeship. A literary critic and short-story writer, Baccino also writes for EL Pais, a Montevideo newspaper. Why, then, had he waited so long to give readers this poetic novel? Why at age forty-seven and not before?
The answer is simple. Baccino is a severe critic of his own work. Five Black Ships, the first novel he has allowed to be published, is not his first attempt at writing. "I have written novels all my life," he told me, but to him these novels were mere exercises in learning the craft. "Five Black Ships was the first novel I thought worthwhile enough to publish," he explained. "Six hundred typewritten pages I launched into the world as one would throw a bottle into the sea."
Had it not seen the light, we would have been deprived of an eloquent book, one that its author describes as an ode to freedom and adventure. A self-described "coastal sailor" and "navigator of t...
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...de las Americas for your first novel?
Baccino: I thought that perhaps I was not as crazy as Don Fernando in having dedicated five years to formulating this fictitious world. In some way, the apprenticeship of over twenty-five years was finally bearing fruit. What I wanted to do was to become a novelist, not even a writer of any other genre, just a plain novelist, and I had achieved it.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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