El cristo feo
novel by Alicia Yánez Cossío
El Cristo Feo is a 1995 novel by Ecuadorian poet and novelist Alicia Yánez Cossío.
The novel won the Joaquín Gallegos Lara Prize as the best Ecuadorian novel of the year and the Indigo Coté Femmes de París Prize. According to Yánez, the protagonist of the novel is a projection of herself.
Plot
Ordalisa is a domestic worker who lives in a small and modest room without windows. One morning she starts to hear a voice calling her name. After searching all over the room for the source of the voice, she discovers that it is coming from an old and ugly crucifix made of wood. Ordalisa finds herself puzzled by the incident, without knowing if the voice is real or a product of the loneliness, she feels from living alone and not counting on family.
Ordalisa's employers ask her to move with them to one of the empty rooms in the house and she gladly accepts. In the following days, the ugly crucifix starts to motivate Ordalisa to be more assertive, to not be ashamed of expressing her desires, and to get ready better. One day she sees her boss arranging his collection of stamps and asks him if he gets bored doing the same things every day.
“El cristo feo” enters the record as novel by Alicia Yánez Cossío. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what cristo, novel and Alicia can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“El cristo feo” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, cristo, novel and Alicia provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q87301698. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “El cristo feo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.