The Truth
Geoff Rips

Winner of the 2006 AWP Award for the Novel
Nicholas Delbanco, Judge

From Nicholas Delbanco’s statement:

"This is a hard book to describe and an impossible one to forget. The Truth is that rarest of things: an original vision and text. Narrated by a cripple in a whorehouse in San Antonio, describing his thoughts, his companions— those who arrive to play or remain upstairs to work, those who share his miseries and beer and eloquently voiced plaints about the nature of existence— it’s a stylistic cross between Marquez and Fuentes, with an adleaven of Gunter Grass.

Listen to the narrator:
Call me Chuy. Chuy Testimonio de Feliz Pingarrón. I am the only known son of my mother, who did not refuse to claim me in the last minutes of her deathbed. And I’m not the only son, I’ll wager on my soul, of my father who will wander faceless through the dark rooms of eternity. They also call me son of old Ofelia. They also call me worse than a cockroach. They also call me third post from the right.

That’s the opening beat of the book, and it’s a clarion call. There’s a gallery of unforgettable folk: Chuy himself, the even more afflicted Don Apolo in an iron lung, the Midwife who’s also a Madam, Angelita of the healing hands, la Verdad who tells the fortunes of her customers while serving them and understands ‘the truth’ of death-in-life. From first paragraph to final line, this is a major debut.”

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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