9 Chronicles of Disenchantment: Rethinking Venezuelan National Identity in Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles's Los desterrados

In the midst of the Venezuelan publishing boom of the last fifteen years, Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles has stood out as one of the most prolific writers. He is the author of a trilogy comprised of the novels Blue Label/Etiqueta azul (2010), Transilvania Unplugged (2011) and Liubliana (2012), of a brief and illustrated novel narrated from a child's perspective, Julián (2014), and of a crime novel, Jezabel (2013). His work breaks with the trend of fiction about Venezuelan national identity (in Spanish, venezolanidad), by focusing on twenty-first-century middle-class Venezuelan experiences of migration. His texts speak to a generation of readers who recognise themselves not only in their use of Venezuelan idioms (venezolanismos) but moreover in the allusions to Venezuelan popular media culture from the 1980s and 1990s. These factors have come together to form a literary project that conceives of displacement as a starting point for the life experiences of his characters, whose identities are shaped in a 'radical disagreement with the imaginary of rootedness' (Rivas Rojas, 2013: 199; all translations are the author's own).