Cuando los hombres fuertes lloran de Carmen Delia de Suárez, relectura de una novela salvadoreña olvidada

Abstract

Cuando los hombres fuertes lloran (1976), a novel by Salvadoran writer Carmen Delia de Suárez, has been forgotten for different reasons for over forty years, in spite of the importance of its subject. The novel did not have a good reception by the right nor by the left because neither agreed with the ideas presented in it. The left would not agree with the idealist theses on social change endorsed by the novel. The right would not accept its denunciation of dictatorial systems as something harmful to the peoples and which was something to be eliminated. The novel dramatizes the suffering that a dictatorship can inflict to those who oppose it. It’s time to read the novel again, and to assess its contribution to Central American novel writing in order to place it in the canon of Central American narrative.