Acevedo, Rafael
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1960- ) Puerto Rican professor of Spanish Literature in the Universidad de Puerto Rico, at Río Piedras, and author. Acevedo is one of the most important poets of the 1980s generation, and a relevant cultural figure on the island of Puerto Rico. He directed the poetry magazine Filo de Juego ["Edge of Game"] and the cultural section En Rojo ["In Red"], published in the weekly magazine Claridad ["Clarity"]. He is also an acclaimed playwright whose plays have been performed in different cities of Latin America and the USA.
Acevedo has also published some fiction, including the sf novel Exquisito cadáver ["Exquisite Corpse"] (2001), which won an honourable mention in the Premio Casa de las Américas, Cuba for 2001. Extrapolating the term's meaning in poetry, Acevedo wrote a novel that attempts to emulate an "exquisite corpse" Round-Robin story written in prose. The novel is a mise in abyme, structured as a pastiche, in what might be called a postmodern form (see Postmodernism and SF). It is the story of a detective who may or may not be investigating a perhaps real crime, in a perhaps true reality. Equipoisally mixing elements from the crime (see Crime and Punishment) and sf literary subgenres, and musical traditions – mostly boleros – the novel is significantly original in its intricate (and sometimes difficult to follow) plot, in part due to the endless literary and philosophical references that appear in its pages. The novel also homages various sf traditions, such as Star Trek and authors including Philip K Dick and Stanisław Lem – in particular the film adaptation of the latter's novel Solaris (1961; trans 1970; new trans 2011 ebook) by the Russian movie director Andrei Tarkovsky as Solaris (1972). [JCTR]
Rafael Acevedo
born Santurce, Puerto Rico: 1960
works (selected)
- Exquisito cadáver ["Exquisite Corpse"] (Santiago, Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2001) [pb/]
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