SOURCE: Arkinstall, Christine. “Fabrics and Fabrications in Cristina Peri Rossi's La nave de los locos.” In Travellers' Tales, Real and Imaginary, in the Hispanic World and Its Literature, edited by Alun Kenwood, pp. 150–58. Melbourne: Voz Hispanica, 1992.

In the following essay, Arkinstall analyzes Peri Rossi's use of the Tapestry of the Creation from the Gerona Cathedral and sixteenth-century paintings as metaphors in La nave de los locos.

The novel La nave de los locos by the Uruguayan writer, Cristina Peri Rossi, resident in Spain since 1972, has close links with her own life. The perpetual state of exile suffered by her character Equis or “X” can well be connected with the enforced exile of his creator, as Peri Rossi, a militant dissident in the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio, had to abandon Uruguay shortly before the military coup.¹ The theme of exile embodied by Equis reveals Peri Rossi's opposition to all...