LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD IN THE RED LIGHT DISTRICT

A revised edition of Argueta’s prizewinning 1978 novel, one of the most popular books ever published in El Salvador. It’s a rather heavy-going allegorical fairy tale, in which the title”district” is the brutal military regime that provoked that country’s long ongoing civil war (whose underground combatants, in this story, include Arcuata’s militant protagonist Alfonso, a dissident student-poet, and his lover Hormica, a.k.a. “Ant”).The allegory scores its points, all right, but its discursive, hectoring tone makes Argueta’s very busy, sometimes strident novel much more effective as ingenious political counterstatement than as art.