Blue Label
SynopsisPlot
Eugenia Blanc, a young Caraqueñan and quintessential teenager at war with the world around her, has one aim: after graduating from high school, to abandon Venezuela definitively. She embarks on a spontaneous road trip in a banged-up Fiat with her rebellious classmate Luis Tévez, in search of her grandfather, the one person who can provide her with the documents that would allow her to leave the country. While Eugenia and Luis’s tentative, troubled romance unfolds during the Chávez era, the story also looks back at Venezuela’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, a time of intractable violence, inequality, corruption, and instability that led to Chávez’s election.
Story
About this book
Eugenia Blanc is a teenager in Caracas with a single fixed goal: to leave Venezuela for good once she finishes high school. To do that she needs documents only her grandfather can provide, and reaching him means setting off on an unplanned road trip in a battered Fiat alongside Luis Tévez, a restless classmate whose company she did not entirely plan on. The two travel through a country shaped by the presidency of Hugo Chávez, and their hesitant, uneasy connection develops against a backdrop of political tension and personal uncertainty.
The novel moves between two periods. One is the present of Eugenia and Luis's trip during the Chávez years. The other reaches back into the 1990s, a decade marked by deep inequality, corruption, violence, and institutional failure across Venezuela. Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles uses that earlier era to trace the conditions that eventually brought Chávez to power, linking the country's recent past to the frustrations driving Eugenia's desire to emigrate.
Blue Label is Sánchez Rugeles's first novel and received a literary prize. The narrative threads a coming-of-age story through national upheaval, grounding broad political questions in the specific choices of two young people on a road with no guaranteed destination.
