Helen E. Haines

SOURCE: "Fiction from Latin America," in What's in a Novel, Columbia University Press, 1942, pp. 169-96.

There must come a conception of life which, without denying the fundamental union between man and the earth would lift him past the barriers that had held him back until then to lead him to the more complete forms of existence.

—Ciro Alegria: Broad and Alien Is the World

To the vast majority of readers in the United States, Latin American fiction is more remote, more exotic, than any of the fiction of Europe. The two Américas share a hemisphere; they have never shared a common understanding. Underlying their deep separation are fundamental differences in folk roots, in historical development, in religion, in social and cultural conditions that set up barriers to mutual sympathetic response and that are not resolved by friendly trade relations or political agreements. With the rise of world conflict "hemispheric solidarity" has become not simply a pious phrase of political aspiration but a profound and urgent necessity. There is deepening realization in both continents of the need of closer social and cultural ties—of reciprocal relations in education, and of a much more extensive exchange of literature between the Latin American countries and the United States—if any real bond of understanding is to be established between them.

Many cultured Latin Americans read English and are familiar with the work of North American writers, many of whose books also have been translated into Spanish; English is required in the schools of ten of the Latin American countries, and its study is steadily increasing in all. But Latin American literature is virtually unknown to the general reading public of the United States. That the most widely known novel (The Thatched Hut) of the Ecuadorian novelist Jos6 Icaza should have been translated into six languages, one of them Chinese, but not into English, shows this limitation of our literary horizon. Yet the mind of a people reveals itself in that people's literature, and through the books of Latin American writers it is possible to gain a knowledge and understanding that otherwise can come only from personal experience.

Since the early 1920's there has been a sporadic endeavor to acquaint cultivated readers in the United States with the variety and vitality of contemporary Latin American fiction. Isaac Goldberg, Waldo Frank, Anita Brenner, Carleton Beals have been among the leaders in this endeavor; and about thirty novels by Mexican and South American writers were published in English translation in this country during this period. They reached only a limited audience; commercially, they must have registered loss rather than profit. But their publication marked a step toward fuller representation in our current book production of this young American literature, that, like our own, is an expression of American culture, and that, also like our own, holds portent of American development and American destiny. A further step was taken in 1940, when a prize contest for the best book, preferably a novel, by a Latin American author was initiated by the New York publishing firm of Farrar & Rinehart, with the aid of the Division of Intellectual Cooperation of the Pan-American Union and of literary groups in the different Latin American countries. Ciro Alegria, exiled Peruvian novelist, was awarded the prize in March, 1941, for his novel Broad and Alien Is the World; and three other novelists received honorable mention: Enrique Gil Gilbert, of Ecuador, for Our Daily Bread; Cecilio J. Carneiro, of Brazil, for The Bonfire; Miguel Angel Menéndez, of Mexico, for Nayar. Other similar contests are to follow, to include fiction, nonfiction (biographic, sociological, or philosophic), and a book for children. To make this fresh-flowing stream of Latin American fiction—so varied, so significant—more available in English translation, to strengthen and stimulate appreciation of its interest and potential values should be a more effective means of realizing aims and ideals of intracontinental relationship than chamber of commerce excursions, scholastic dissertations, or political oratory.

Much Latin American fiction undoubtedly carries an impact of shock to many North American readers. The shock is less than it would have been a few years ago, before so many of our own novelists had turned to harsh transcription of brutal experience in their recording of social and economic evils; but its immediate effect may be painful or benumbing. The exotic pictorial vividness of these novels seems crude or garish; their violence of action, their mingling of primitive barbarism with sophisticated European culture, gives a sense of unreality; in structure and development they may lack coherence and climax; often they reek of human suffering and are veined with cruelty, as they picture oppression and exploitation, political corruption, and revolutionary conflict. All this, however, represents the creation of a self-sufficient, individual literary culture. Latin American novelists have broken the traditional bond with nineteenth-century Spanish letters. They have drawn their substance from their native soil, and their qualities of expression, in exuberance, in abruptness, in disorder and intensity, are the manifestations of the life they delineate. Their preoccupation with social problems, their dominant tendency to the tragic, their absorption in natural settings of savage beauty, impart an inner unity to what is essentially a literature of national and social transmutation. Russian fiction nearly a century ago extended the boundaries and enlarged the horizons of the novel in its exploration of the human spirit; today Latin American fiction opens for exploration the processes of social evolution in the New World that is part of, but completely different from, our own.

Mexican fiction has had very little representation in the influx of books about Mexico that came into being about 1928, under the influence of D. H. Lawrence, Anita Brenner, Stuart Chase, Carleton Beals, and Waldo Frank, and that still continues, though in lessened volume. But the few Mexican novels that are available in English translation illuminate significant backgrounds of the contemporary scene and give color and reality to the folk life of the people.

The Under Dogs, Mariano Azuela's novel of the revolution of 1911-17, is the most famous modern Mexican novel. First published when its author was in exile in El Paso, it went unheeded for ten years; but by 1927 its fame had spread throughout the Spanish-speaking literary world, and it will long remain a vital evocation of the break-up of a country under the sudden flare of civil war, assassination, hate, the uprising of the "under dogs" from centuries of servitude into a savage freedom of fighting, comradeship, and brutal pillage. Azuela, by profession a physician, went himself as military doctor with the guerrilla band that was transformed into a Villa army which swarmed like locusts, burning, killing, looting, and carousing through the states of Zacatecas and Jalisco. From this experience he drew the material for his novel; its last scene, we are told, was written in a cave overlooking the annihilation of the band, and the rest was composed later, in exile. The book is short: direct, dramatic, vivid. Its central figure is the guerrilla leader, driven from his patch of land, his hut and cows and wife and child, drawing about him followers like himself; half-naked pelados, swept into the whirlpool of revolution, hardly knowing how or why; victims and perpetrators alike of ruthless violence and brutal crime. One savage, picturesque scene follows another in extraordinary flesh-and-blood reality; and through all the tragedy, futility, coarseness, high exploits, and abysmal cruelties there is conveyed a sense of pity for the poor and ignorant, to whom Villa was the reincarnation of the old legend: "Villa as Providence, the bandit, that passes through the world with the blazing torch of an ideal: to rob the rich and give to the poor."

Beside Azuela's novel must stand the narrative of Martín Luis Guzmán, The Eagle and the Serpent, often regarded as fiction, though it is in fact personal reminiscence in dramatic dialogue form, which gives a first-hand record of the revolution during the years of Villa's power. Personal experience, adventure, vigorous character etching, quickly moving drama, mingle in this absorbing, authentic narrative. It is detailed, following no single plot-thread, with the flavor of mixed good humor, sardonic indifference and devil-may-care casualness which is characteristic of the Mexican temperament, even in grim danger or tragic circumstance. There is no artificiality, no writing for effect; even the most monstrous scenes of ruthless cruelty are invested with a direct simplicity. Guzmán, like Azuela, wrote from his own experience. He was a follower and champion of Villa, never deserted him, and sees him always with admiring eyes—even his cruelty, ruthlessness, irresponsibility, infantile pomposity, crass sentimentalities. Both books have continuing value as historical material.

Azuela has written many other novels; his work as a whole forms a broad fictional canvas of the social-revolutionary struggle, from the last days of the Diaz regime, with the dominance of the rich landowners, through the rise and fall of Madero, the devastating conflicts of rival parties, and the disillusion, corruption, and persecutions of later years. Always he deals with the exploited classes: the Indian peon, the tenant farmer, the middle class, helpless under political rascality; all under dogs in a complex social struggle. Of these novels only one has appeared in English translation: Marcela—a passionate love story of Indian peons on a feudal estate ruled by a cruel and dissolute owner, its folk life curiously mingling subtlety and fierceness, its pervading superstition blending ancient Indian lore and Catholic ritual; its feuds and lusts and cruelties pervaded by the exotic beauty of its natural setting.

More limited but of deep significance is the aspect of Mexican life portrayed in El Indio, the novel by Gregorio López y Fuentes, that won Mexico's first National Prize of Literature, in 1935. This is a study of the Mexican Indian in his own tribal life and in his traditional fear and distrust of white or mestizo civilization. It deals with a remote Indian village, high in the Mexican mountains; its people, proud, quiet, wary of strangers, speak Aztec, not Spanish. None of them are named, for they are not only individuals but also, as López y Fuentes sees them, symbols of a conquest that has continued for more than four hundred years; yet they have individuality, and their everyday living takes on a warm and moving reality. Their story runs through a period of years. It opens with the arrival of white prospectors, greedy and treacherous, bringing terror and violence and leaving suffering in their wake; it closes with requisitions of food and conscription of labor imposed by officials of the towns in the valley below—the exactions of a government that regards these people only as materials for exploitation. Dramatic and moving episodes are woven into the texture of this primitive living. There is dignity, integrity, courage and devotion in individual experiences; and the communal folkways, with their witch-doctor miracles, their council meetings that give judgment in controversies, their fiesta that opens with solemn ritual and closes with machetes flashing in drunken fight, their ancient sports that have come unchanged from the Aztec past, all compose a fascinating and impressive pattern. There is a quality of classic beauty in the calm simplicity, the stoic dignity, with which the tale is told.

Although they are very different, a certain similarity exists between El Indio and Nayar, the novel by Miguel Angel Menéndez that received honorable mention in the Latin American prize novel contest. Both books are a manifestation of the deepening Indian—as opposed to Spanish—influence in contemporary Latin American literature, which accepts the elemental pattern of tribal Indian life and the qualities and powers of the race as potential sources of a rich indigenous national culture, and seeks to expose exploitation and oppression exercised under the civil, military, and religious domination rooted in Spanish conquest. The scene is a remote province (Nayarit) on the west coast of Mexico, a region of mountains, forest jungles, salt marshes, and obscure villages, where the remnants of two primitive Indian tribes lead a harassed existence, victimized by both whites and mestizos, held in bonds of poverty, ignorance, superstition, and magic, and in a sudden flaring of civil and religious conflict ultimately crushed between opposed forces of government and revolutionaries. Nayar, however, has an emotional exuberance, an intensity of color and action, far removed from the restraint of El Indio; the work of a poet (later, Mexican minister to China), it weaves a complex social problem into a vivid, uneven web of tragedy.

Even a partial gleaning from the South American fiction that is available in English translation will reveal its rich variety of content and its historical and social significance. For such a gleaning we have books by representative novelists from seven of the South American countries. These, following a rough topographical order from north to south, are: Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Countries from which no fiction is represented are Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Of course, in these a native literature exists; in Ecuador, especially, novelists of talent are exploring their country's composite human elements; but it must be remembered that very little of the whole body of South American fiction has been translated into English; and in the translations that have been made, the work of Argentinian, Brazilian, Colombian, and Venezuelan writers predominates.

Perhaps a word should be said first concerning the whole field of South American fiction. The Latin Americans have always been a literary people; they have as heritage the traditions and the culture of the Roman Catholic Church, and that heritage found expression through the four centuries of their history in a continuous, changing flow of literary productions. Prose narratives and heroic poems of conquest and discovery mirror the early colonial period. Dramas, poems, and devotional writings were strongest in the static years of undisturbed Spanish rule. The opening of the nineteenth century and the rise of the Napoleonic era saw the advent of the revolutionary years and the birth of an entirely different literature of national aspiration and passionate purpose, as the struggle for independence from the mother country plunged the Spanish colonies into ruthless war. Yet throughout most of the nineteenth century the colonial spirit and manner of life persisted. Not until the last quarter of that century did the rising wave of reform and innovation wash away traditional literary conventions and disclose a new creative spirit. No general literacy yet exists in South America; until the turn of the century public education bore the stamp of medieval Europe rather than that of the modern world. Literature has been the field of an intellectual elite, which cultivated it as the means and the sign of culture. Authorship in the past did not mean earning a living; even today few of the leading South American authors depend on their books for their full income—they are usually also journalists, teachers, lawyers, doctors; most of the older men can look back on a common life experience of revolution, prison, political vicissitudes; nearly all were pamphleteers, poets, and dramatists before they became novelists. This has meant that the literature they produce is generally of high literary quality: their books are written, not for commercial reasons, but to express convictions, ideals, or the inner urge of the spirit.

Within the twentieth century the audience for South American writers has greatly increased, and since 1930 a native book production has come into existence that has broken down former literary border lines between the different countries and virtually eliminated the "literary colonialism" that depended on Spain for its book supply. The publishing house of Ercilla, established in Santiago de Chile in 1932, has become a center for publication and distribution throughout South America. Whereas formerly Argentine books were little known in Ecuador, and Venezuelan writers found fewer readers in Chile, the Ercilla firm now handles books by all Latin American authors and makes them available to all Latin American readers. During the first five years of its existence (to January, 1937) it published 1,120 books by many hundreds of authors, including not only the work of writers from every Latin American country but also books of leading French, Italian, German, Russian, English, and North American authors, issued in Spanish translation. Influences for growth and strength have flowed into Latin American literature from Spain's tragedy. The extinction of the Spanish Republic under fascist victory and the resulting extirpation of Spain's modern thought and culture by destruction and interdiction of books, restriction of education, and exile of writers and scientists, have brought deepening and widening intellectual life to Spanish America. In Mexico publishing, printing, educational, scientific, and literary activities have been centered, under sponsorship of the Spanish Government in Exile, in Mexico City. Exiled Spanish writers, scholars, and artists in many fields are also at work in other Latin American countries; and the dissemination of modern continental and English literature in Spanish translation steadily increases.

This expanding audience, this birth of a continental spirit, finds its manifestation in the rise of fiction. Poetry has always been the leading form in Latin American literature, the mark of culture and idealism. But within a generation, while poetry holds its place, there has been widespread development of novels and short stories, by writers who have disregarded the older aristocratic limitations, who are going for their material to life itself, reflecting and interpreting the common experience of the world and the people amid which they live. Of this contemporary fiction Waldo Frank says:

There are novelists like the Mexican, Mariano Azuela, who are depicting the life of the Mexican Indian, soldier, mestizo, in the passionate years of revolution. There are novelists like the Colombian, José Eustacio Rivera, who bring the cruel and deep suffering of mankind in the jungles into their pages. Argentinians, like Ricardo Giuiraldes, Leopold Lugones, Horacio Quiroga, tell the tales of the gaucho, of the small country village lost on the pampa, of the northern forests where gigantic snakes still dispute the land with the pioneers. Venezuelan novelists, like Rufino Blanco-Fombona, reveal the political and social fabric of their complex world; and like Teresa de la Parra the struggle of women to be free of the medieval trammels of the church. In Chile, there is a whole school of admirable novelists devoted to the pastoral life of the villages beneath the Andes.

In summarizing the books of the novelists chosen, the most effective course seems to be to follow the map, opening with the most northern country, moving southward, then westward, then south again; and attempting to trace in these novels the backgrounds, historical and social, of the countries whose life they reflect.

For Venezuela we have Rufino Blanco-Fombona, one of the older leading figures in contemporary Latin American literature, whose life is part of his country's annals of revolution; and the younger novelist, Rómulo Gallegos, most widely popular of present-day Venezuelan writers.

Blanco-Fombona, born in Caracas, in 1874, of old Spanish aristocratic stock, represents the mingling of the aristocratic and insurrecto strain as it was exemplified in Simón Bolívar, "The Liberator,"—also born in Caracas nearly a century earlier—and in the young creole aristocrats who died by thousands for the cause of independence. In a volume of critical and biographical essays (La Ldmpara de Aladino, 1915) he has written his own epitaph:

This man, like one beloved of the gods, died young. He knew how to love and to hate with all his heart. He loved fields, rivers, fountains; he loved good wine, he loved marble, steel, gold; he loved nubile women and beautiful verses. He despised the timorous, the presumptuous, and the mediocre. He hated traitors, hypocrites, calumniators, venal spirits.… In the midst of his injustice he was just.… He attacked only the strong. He had ideals and struggled and made sacrifices for them.… Only one thing did he ever refrain from giving: advice.… It is not known whether he was moral or immoral or amoral; but he placed beauty and truth—his truth—above all. He enjoyed and suffered much, spiritually and physically.… His life was illogical. His thought was contradictory. His one unchanging attribute was his sincerity, both in feeling and thought.… He preached liberty by example; he was free. He was a soul of the sixteenth century and a man of the twentieth. He rests in peace for the first time. May the earth, which he loved, be propitious to him.

Very evident here is the quality of oratory, the flow of rhythmic eloquence, that is so strong an element in Latin American politics and literature and that finds intensified emotional expression in fiction.

His stormy political and public career, his varied literary work, in poetry, criticism, sociology, politics, and fiction, make Blanco-Fombona an important contemporary figure. From the age of eighteen, when he was a volunteer in the revolution against President Andueza, he participated in his country's many political struggles, held consular and governmental positions, twice visited the United States (where he contracted a violent dislike for the country and its people), suffered imprisonment, fought duels, escaped assassination; traveled widely in South America as well as in Europe; and lived in Paris and Madrid.

As a novelist, his reputation has long been established. The Man of Gold, translated into English by Isaac Goldberg in 1929, is a companion novel to his previous book, The Man of Iron, considered his most important work, which was written when he was in prison in 1907 and has not, so far as I know, appeared in English translation. These two novels, as Goldberg points out, form an ideological unity—the second the natural outgrowth from the first. Both titles are ironic: The Man of Iron is an honest, simple, creature of passive nature, easily molded, the victim of his virtues; The Man of Gold is a creature of alloy, a repulsive miser and usurer, whose single passion is gain and whose story is an ironic composition on the theme of the triumph of evil over good. Both novels are placed in the romantic, languorous setting of Caracas, and both apply stinging satire and bitter irony to social and political conditions in Venezuela under the Castro regime. The Man of Gold strikes most vigorously at the machinations and greed of politicians, undoubtedly veiling in caricature some recognizable figures in the political annals of Caracas. Its central figure is the miser and moneylender, withered and hideous, who lives in filthy penury with his crippled, miserable old housekeeper and who is brought into business relationship with three well-born spinsters and their beautiful young niece, Olga, the single object of their devotion. Olga, selfish and ruthless, conceives the idea that the youngest of her aunts should marry the miser: she will undoubtedly outlive him and inherit his wealth, and Olga will be her heiress. On this purpose the plot is woven, carrying the miser to growing political importance as his wealth brings about him sycophants and corrupt officials. There is a play of satirical humor throughout; cruel, sometimes vulgar, realism and harsh physical details are curiously combined with limpid charm; and the vivid portrayal of many different types conveys a sense of varied, distinctive life.

Very different is Doha Barbara, the slight but vivid and fascinating novel by Rómulo Gallegos which mirrors ranch life on the Venezuelan plains. It mingles realism and romanticism, and it unrolls a memorable panorama of magnificent natural backgrounds, of wild and vigorous life amid wide streams and vast savannahs, with the far-ranging herds, the lighthearted swaggering plainsmen, and the primitive isolated ranches set down in illimitable expanses. Especially interesting are the contrasts and similarities of this exotic frontier with our own early western cattle country, and the differences of temperament and tradition between the Latin American plainsman and his Nordic counterpart. The story centers on the fortunes of an old Venezuelan family, decimated by an ancient feud, still keeping its great homestead on the plains, though it has fallen into ruin and is being gradually absorbed through the chicaneries of the nearest ranch owner, the powerful, notorious Dofia Barbara, a woman of half-Indian blood and lawless background who has made herself despot of the region. The only son and survivor of the ancient family has been educated in Caracas and admitted to the law, but the heritage of his plains ancestry still lives in him. He returns to the half-abandoned ranch to consider selling the property; and then his childhood memories, his inborn nature of the plainsman, reassert themselves. He remains, to regain and restore the family domain and to inaugurate, so far as possible, an era of justice and fair dealing. But he is confronted by the power, greed, and passions of Dofia Barbara and by the rascalities of the North American hunter and trader ("the foreigner"), who has established himself in squatter sovereignty on Donia Barbara's land. The courts are corrupt, and the very law that young Santos-Luzardo seeks to invoke has been enacted through the influence of his enemies. His anger is roused, and he determines to fight them in their own fashion; but his natural high principles hold him to honest dealing, and in the end he wins victory through finer means. A love story that is both dramatic and appealing is woven into the plot. The charm and dramatic interest of the novel lie in the portrayal of the plainsman's life: the herding and branding of the cattle, the breaking of the horses, the details of ranch management, the personalities of the plainsmen themselves, their superstitions and customs; and the impressive, beautiful panoramic background of the plains under all the changes of the seasons.

Gallegos is regarded as the most important present-day literary figure in Venezuela. He displays high dramatic ability and a romantic spirit, yet he writes objectively, without expressing personal intensities of feeling, as does Blanco-Fombona. He understands the psychology, landscape, and language of his country, and in some half-dozen novels he has given brilliant portrayal of different turbulent or formative periods in Venezuelan history.

We pass now to Colombia—that country of which most North Americans know very little, set in the northwest corner of South America, adjoining the isthmus of Panama. Bogoti, the capital, center of the country's literature as of its social and political life, is one of the most remote and inaccessible of cities, far in the interior, behind great mountain ranges and mighty rivers, raised up on its high tableland to an elevation of 8,500 feet. To reach Bogotá required in the old days a journey of at least three weeks; today there is a modern air service, but those who do not fly must give nearly a week to the transit. On account of this isolation the people have kept many of the ancient native and Spanish characteristics, and life has changed comparatively little from its earlier pattern. The intellectual class has held to aristocratic traditions; in literature, poetry has been predominant, and it is only within recent years that liberal forces have begun to find expression among the younger writers. Fiction of the older type is represented in Colombia by the most widely read novel written by any South American: the famous romance María, by Jorge Isaacs, published in 1867, still one of the standard school "classics," familiar in Europe and the United States. This is an idyl of young love cut short by death, picturing benign and patriarchal home life on a great estate in the valley of the Cauca; traditional in its lachrymal sensibility, it is simple and charming in its details of family relationship, picturesque in its vivid incidents of hunting and its depiction of native customs.

More representative of modern literary art is Pax, by Lorenzo Marroquin, who died in 1918: a novel that deserves to rank with the serious and powerful anti-war fiction of the present day. Pax is a long novel, elaborate, somewhat overweighted with detail, but colorful and moving in its presentation of love, intrigue, religion, politics, and revolution. It is infused with a passionate sincerity of desire to portray evils that consume a beloved country. Lorenzo Marroquin knew his people and their customs, the landscape, the social and historical backgrounds, the vanishing nobility and its ideals, the rising lower classes and their purpose. His sympathies were with aristocratic ideals, with religious faith, and with patriotic self-sacrifice for both; but his deepest feeling was of the waste and horror and futility of war. It is the same feeling that underlies The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the later war novels, from Remarque to Hemingway; and it is expressed in his title, which symbolizes "a war-sick world crying 'Peace! Peace!' through the silenced voice of sacrificed youth." The tale opens in peace time and shows a cross-section of Colombian life—in the city and in the country, at home, at the opera, at the race track, in business offices, in political departments at banquets, weddings, and funerals, in church, and in literary assemblies. Then comes outbreak of civil war, bursting forth from political strife over a national industrial project (what we should probably call a battle of rival interests over public utilities), and destruction and death are let loose over the country. Youth is drawn into the vortex, revolutionary forces meet in conflict, there are burning cities, ravaged fields, fleeing refugees, congested hospitals, and battlefields strewn with dead and dying. The novel moves to a somber tragic climax in its vision of war, its passionate appeal for peace; but it holds sustained human interest in the fortunes of the many characters, the lights and shadows of experience, the romance and caricature and satire that are part of its fabric. It is a book that will repay careful reading; for it imparts social, historical, and human understanding of a country and a people.

The Vortex, the single novel of José Eustacio Rivera, is probably the most remarkable production of Latin American fiction. It was born of personal experience in the rubber forests of the Rio Negro, where the author, distinguished poet and diplomat, served on the commission that traced the definite boundary between Colombia and Venezuela. His book was conceived in the heart of the jungle, where, like the hero of his novel, he trudged "through leech-infested swamps, bare-footed, half-starved, crazed by mosquitos and fevers," writing, not on paper, but in his mind, and reciting in the evening what he had "written" during the day; his death, in 1928, was caused by a mysterious malady contracted at that time. This is the fevered, brilliant narrative of a youthful poet and lover, who has fled with his sweetheart from Bogotá to escape pursuit of the law, invoked by the girl's parents. The two find haven first in the grasslands, on a great cattle ranch, in a wild, primitive existence of feuds, round-ups, drinking, cockfights, gambling, and promiscuous lovemaking. Then violence and betrayal separate them; the youth, again a fugitive, plunges deeper into the wilderness and is caught, with other miserable human beings, in the vortex of the rubber jungles, to be held in a slavery of hopeless labor, starved, tortured by ants, leeches, and poisonous insects, cheated by sadistic traders, surrounded by appalling cruelties, experiencing love, lust, exaltation, horror, and despair. The monstrous conditions of the rubber traffic, as exposed in the famous Casement report on the Putomayo jungles in Brazil, live again in this extraordinary narrative, which combines introspection and objectivity, romantic lyric emotionalism and starkly brutal realism.

Peru has a long tradition of literary art, flowering in poetry and in essays, fruitful in serious works of research, but with little representation of fiction, except in the form of the cuento, or short story. The only contemporary Peruvian novel that has been brought in translation to American readers is Broad and Alien Is the World, by Ciro de Alegria, prize winner in the Latin American novel competition of 1940. Alegria, as a member of the Apra revolutionary political party, which was defeated in 1932 and later outlawed, went into exile after a term of imprisonment and makes his home in Chile. His novel may be considered an expression of the "Aprismo movement" in Peruvian literature, dedicated to the social-political struggle and the championship of the native Indian race against oppression and exploitation. There is a close relationship between this novel and El Indio, although the Mexican Indian folk life depicted by López y Fuentes is less civilized and more isolated than is that of the Peruvian Indian community, which, unchanging through centuries, still carries traces of the communal socialist pattern that shaped the ancient Inca civilization of Peru. Here in colorful panoramic narrative, with intricate variation of scene and incident yet with complete unity of the whole, unfolds the tragedy of the small Indian village of Rumi, high up in the Peruvian Andes. For generations it has maintained a happy and industrious communal agrarian existence, primitive and toilsome, but giving independence and livelihood to its people. There is poverty, ignorance, and superstition, but there is also tolerance, communal loyalty, sturdy self-respect, and dimly sensed abilities for self-development. Government is in the hands of a mayor and four councillors, elected to their office; and the mayor, Rosendo Maqui, whose life is followed from youth to death, is the central figure: rugged, wise, shrewd, the father of his people, their fellow worker and leader, dying in prison, still their defender. The fate of Rumi is portended when Don Alvaro Amenabar, rich and predatory landowner of the town in the valley, institutes suit against the community, charging that the land it had occupied for generations rightfully belonged to him. The land itself has no value; but he owns silver mines in the region beyond, and cheap labor for them may be gained by dispossession of the Indians. Upon Rosendo Maqui falls the responsibility to fight Don Alvaro in the courts and try to save his people, panic-stricken and helpless.

This life-and-death struggle against hopeless odds is the substance of the novel. We see the Indian community cheated by tricky lawyers and corrupt officials, uprooted and bewildered, moving silently up the mountainside to more barren lands to begin again to establish their community, to meet privation, difficulties, despair; again to be attacked by military force as a center of revolt, machine guns sweeping the cliffs where only the sick, women, and children remain, in a final triumph of tragic repression. We follow individual victims into strange servitudes in a broad and alien world: to the long-drawn-out miseries of the malarial coca plantations; to the terrible purgatory of the rubber swamps and jungles; to the hopeless lot of the Indian soldier, herded to fight in strange causes of which he knows nothing. Some, the bolder and stronger, become bandits; the countryside, once peaceful, is torn by violence, menaced by danger. Powerful, deeply moving, picturesque and vital in characterization, there is a strong poetic quality in Alegria's novel; tragic and compassionate, it is also challenging in its portrayal of Indian dignity and integrity and of native abilities that need only education and opportunity to fulfill themselves. The leader who in the second community succeeds Rosendo Maqui strives for such fulfillment. He carries out draining of the land by dynamiting a channel from an "enchanted lake," haunt of a Chaco, or evil spirit. That would bring more crops, the village would thrive, a school would be established: "once they had a school, then in ten or twenty years nobody would believe in enchanted lakes or Chacos." He, too, perishes under machine guns and Mauser bullets. The pitiful, unequal conflict, in its essence and its implications is the conflict that grips the world today—freedom against despotism.

Brazil, bordering Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru, stretching far southward beside Bolivia and Argentina, is a world in itself: a mighty empire—Portuguese, not Spanish, in its European origin and language—a union of states greater in area than our own, underpopulated, undeveloped in relation to its size and resources, but holding unpredictable power in the future of the Américas. To the literature of Brazil, Isaac Goldberg devoted a substantial close-packed volume; but very little has appeared in translation for English readers. Four Brazilian novels, however, that have been made available in English represent a varied literary art and illuminate Brazilian life in past and present aspects. Oldest and most famous of these is Canaan, by the scholar and diplomat Graca Aranha, among whose numerous works this is considered by many the masterpiece of Brazilian literature. It is, indeed, a philosophic-realistic-symbolic epic of human brotherhood rather than a novel; its theme, the quest in the New World of a simpler, more humane, more moral, freer and happier society than European civilization can ever attain to. The quest is futile: the German immigrant who seeks in Brazil this promised land, finds there only a continuing re-enactment of the eternal tragedy of man's hatreds, selfishness, brutalities, hypocrisies, egotism, and injustice. Long, elaborate, ranging from abstract philosophical disquisition to ruthless scenes of horror, with backgrounds that shift from city to wilderness, the book has remarkable qualities: rich and powerful imagery, vivid descriptive rendering of tropical beauty, distinctive characterizations, and an ingrained spiritual fervor.

Irony and realism dominate Aluizio Azevedo's tale of the making of a Brazilian millionaire, A Brazilian Tenement. Set in the late nineteenth century, it is a picturesque, episodic chronicle of ruthless greed and of mounting power over the lives of others: the building of a fortune by way of petty, obscure rascalities, exploitation of workers, ownership of a teeming tenement, speculation in real estate, to the emergence of a great capitalist with far-reaching "interests."

Brazilian history is reflected in Domitila, by Paulo Setuibal, one of the writers most loved in his native country. Setubal had originally intended to be a lawyer, but he began writing poetry and gave up a legal career to devote himself to historical romances that should make the history of Brazil their theme. Domitila is a rapid, dynamic novel, rendering one of the dramatic incidents of the region of Dom Pedro I, first emperor of Brazil, it must be remembered, discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, became a Portuguese colony and is today the only country in the western world that speaks the Portuguese language. It was ruled by an imperial governor until 1808, when the King of Portugal fled before Napoleon's invasion, and taking his court of 1,200 persons transferred his seat of government to Brazil. This changed Brazil from a colony to the governing capital of the Portuguese world. For twelve years this continued; then, in 1820, after Napoleon's downfall, the king returned to Portugal, leaving his son, Dom Pedro, to govern Brazil. In 1822 the young prince yielded to the growing Brazilian movement for independence, proclaimed Brazil independent of Portugal, and became Dom Pedro I, founder of a new empire in a new world. He ruled until 1831, when he abdicated and returned to Portugal and was succeeded by his son, the famous emperor Dom Pedro II, who ruled for the next half century and abdicated in 1889, when the Brazilian revolution was accomplished and Brazil became the present republic of federated states, the United States of Brazil. Setubal's novel deals with the reign of Dom Pedro I, from the proclamation of Brazilian independence, in 1822, until 1829. It centers in the rise to power, the triumph, and the downfall of the beautiful Domitila, mistress of the emperor, who for ten years held the strings of political power and who came within a hair's breadth of achieving her passionate ambition of being crowned as empress after the death of Dom Pedro's wife. Historical fact is closely followed; most of the characters are actual persons, politicians, courtiers, officials of the days of the first empire. Costumes and customs, letters and documents quoted and referred to, dramatic incidents, and the whole sequence of events are part of historic record. It is a brilliant, picturesque evocation: a mingling of Old World magnificence and the tropical luxuriance of the semi-barbaric New World. Character portrayal, psychological values, and realistic detail are negligible; the tale is essentially a vivid, pictorial unfolding of passion and intrigue, of a woman's consuming ambition, and of the absolutism and selfish pleasure-seeking of a young ruler, swayed only by his emotions. While the novel has romantic and dramatic interest, its significance is as a reflection of the brilliance, luxury, and tense political conflict of this chapter of Brazil's history.

On the novel by Ferreira de Castro rests the enormous shadow of the jungle. Here the high-keyed intensity of Rivera's phantasmagoria of the Colombian rubber forests is transposed and stabilized into a tempered, thorough, sympathetic, and deeply interesting presentation of life on a rubber plantation in the Rio Madeira jungle of southwestern Brazil. Jungle: a Tale of the Amazon Rubber-Tappers has continuing values of firsthand knowledge and of bringing to simple, clear reality the remote, savage little colonies whose existence centered in the struggle to obtain rubber. Undercurrents of exploitation, of suffering and cruelty, are here; there is psychological insight and distinctive character portrayal; and the mysterious, terrifying atmosphere of the jungle is infused into this story of a young university student, a political exile from his native Portugal, who is suddenly thrust into the barbarous, almost hopeless life of a rubber tapper, but who rises from the slavery of "the avenues" and at last returns to freedom.

Chile's most famous novelist is Alberto Blest Gana, whose ambition was to be the American Balzac. His life spanned nearly a century (he was born in 1830 and died in 1922), and in its two periods of literary activity, separated by thirty years of diplomatic service in Europe, he produced more than a dozen novels concerned with Chilean history and with critical, penetrating study of contemporary society. Martin Rivas, published in 1862, is his masterpiece. It is a long, elaborate novel, old-fashioned in manner, but a mirror of the life and character of its day and place. It is set in Santiago, about 1850. Martin Rivas (truly a hero of the Victorian stamp of nobility and rectitude!) is a young man from the country who makes his home with the family of a wealthy financier, who had built up his riches by fraudulently gaining from Martin's father the silver mine that was the source of his fortune. In this household Martin becomes indispensable; while carrying on his own studies at the law, he is also secretary and adviser to the father, friend and helper to the silly, foppish son, and cherishes a deep, hidden devotion for the beautiful and willful daughter, Leonor. The mother is lazy and luxury loving, devoted to her lapdog; and there is an attractive young cousin, whose unfortunate love affair educes the dramatic and tragic elements of the plot. This family of wealth and pretensions, ambitious for social advancement, is set in contrast with a lower-class family (mother, two daughters, and worthless, scheming son) in a very interesting portrayal of caste lines and differences in customs and manners of living. There are intricate love involvements, resulting feud and complexities, and Martin's participation in the revolutionary uprising of 1851. He is arrested and condemned to death; his danger brings Leonor to realization of her love, and she manages to enlist influences that enable him to escape, so that a "happy ending" is successfully accomplished. In spite of its length and its Victorian qualities, the variety of scenes and the complex interest of events make the story move rapidly and hold its interest to the end. Reality and vitality are established: the reader steps into a living world, into social and home life, into politics, into the festivities and cross currents that made the everyday existence of Chileans of that particular period, all conveying the historic and human reality which is the achievement of fine fiction.

Argentine fiction is more generously represented in English translation than is that of any other Latin American country. In these novels we may find the historical aspect, reflecting the fierce civil wars of the second quarter of the nineteenth century; the aspect of modern social problems and changing economic conditions; the romantic and dramatic rendering of regional and local backgrounds. Argentina made its first definite impact upon English readers early in the present century, when belated recognition came to W. H. Hudson's novel, The Purple Land, with its exotic, pictorial backgrounds, its powerful portrayal of the violent years of struggle against the tyrant-dictator Rosas. Those years, in fact, brought an uprush of passionate expression from Argentine writers, for the whole country was torn and convulsed under the conflict. To understand this, it should be said that after the separation from Spain, Argentina was organized as a centralized or "unitarian" republic, with the capital in Buenos Aires. The provinces, however—the vast plains, with their great ranchos and the half-Spanish, half-Indian gauchos who made up most of the population—refused to accept the rule of the city, rose in rebellion, and demanded a federal republic with a large measure of local autonomy. There were years of civil war; the unitarian party was beaten by the federalists under the leadership of Juan Manuel Rosas, who for twenty-three years, until his downfall in 1852, exerted absolute power and carried on merciless extermination of his enemies. Not until nearly fifty years later was the political conflict finally resolved, when Buenos Aires was made a federal district and capital of the republic. Rosas represented the gauchos of the interior, what would probably today be called the proletariat; his policy of extermination was directed against the intellectual and aristocratic elements, so that the struggle against him was inspired and maintained by the educated classes, the journalists, poets and writers. Many fled to Chile, where they brought a freshening vigor to Chilean literature and infused in it their own vehement protest against despotism.

Foremost among the Argentine writers of this period is w Mármol (1817-71), whose novel Amalia lives as a passionate exposition of the tyranny and degradation of the Rosas dictatorship. Mármol at the age of twenty was imprisoned as a conspirator, scribbling on the walls of his cell a quatrain denouncing the tyrant. This denunciation he continued through years of danger and of exile, in long poems, in quatrains, and in his memorable novel. Amalia conveys the incandescent intensity of his hatred and gives also a remarkable social study of this period in Argentine history, by one who was himself an actor in the events he portrays and who experienced the feelings he describes. It is a long, elaborate historical novel, patterned on Sir Walter Scott, which centers on the tyranny and ferocity of Rosas and the social degradation existing in Buenos Aires under his rule. Its chief actor is a young man, Daniel Bello, enlisted in the struggle against the dictator, but protected in his operations because he is the son of one of Rosas's supporters, and so working skillfully and subterraneously with those who are plotting Rosas's overthrow. The love story, which is a central thread, is woven about Amalia, Daniel's cousin, and a young rebel who is wounded and left for dead in an attack by police and hidden in her house, where she nurses him back to health. The youth is tracked down by Rosas's agents; danger and intrigue menace the lovers and bring the tale to a tragic climax. The novel has unity, power, and sustained interest; a depth of personal feeling and a vividness of description and characterization that give it value as an evocation of time and place and personal experience.

Manuel Galvez, in Nacha Regules, represents the Argentine novelist of modern development, studying the problems and mores of the life he knows. This was the first important postwar novel of Argentina, and for it the city of Buenos Aires awarded Galvez the prize for letters for the year 1920. One of the leading authors of his own country, his work has been widely translated into other languages, and his name has been put forward for the Nobel prize for literature. Nacha Regules is a girl of the streets, who by chance wakens the pity and interest of a Buenos Aires lawyer, a thinker and an idealist. The story tells of his efforts to save her from degradation and suffering and to bring home to society a realization of evils for which it is ultimately responsible. A Tolstoyan touch of idealistic and humanitarian philosophy is evident throughout, but there is Latin emotionalism in the contest of mutual self-sacrifice that is carried on between Nacha and Dr. Monsalvat. The conclusion is one of defeat and disillusion on the surface; but with love and idealism unextinguished and spiritually triumphant. Holy Wednesday, Galvez's second novel to be translated into English, is slighter, simpler, and has a similar undercurrent of idealism. In it we hear the sins of a great city through the grating of a confessional box as we follow one day in the life of Father Solanas, the most popular confessor in Buenos Aires.

The romantic, the dramatic, and the pictorial prevail in the work of Gustavo Martínez Zuviria ("Hugo Wast"), most popular and prolific Argentine novelist, several of whose books have been translated into English. Of these, The Stone Desert should have interest and fascination for any reader; it is the author's own favorite—the novel, he says, which he "most desired to write." Its title comes from the name of a tract of land at the upper end of a great ranch near the top of a remote mountain zone of central Argentina. The old and childless owner of the ranch has received in his home a nephew, whose daughter of twenty is left to maintain and carry on the management. Her struggle and the dangers she encounters are woven into a dramatic, exciting plot, accompanied by strange, impressive natural backgrounds, glimpses of primitive, picturesque ways of life, and arresting characterizations. Black Valley is the Zuviria novel that received a prize from the Royal Spanish Academy. It, too, has strong romantic and dramatic, often melodramatic, flavor, and it strikes a deeper note of tragedy than The Stone Desert. It is set in the same remote, mountainous locale—which is the author's native region—a lonely, haunting valley, a place of storms and silence; it weaves a complex plot of inherited feuds, family enmities, and deep-channeled passions, and it closes on a note, not of romantic fulfillment, but of renunciation. The Strength of Lovers is a re-telling of one of the famous tragedies of the Discovery era: the story of Captain Sebastian Hurtado and his beautiful, valiant wife, Lucia Miranda, who were members of the Sebastian Cabot expedition that sailed from Spain for the new world in 1526 and who met death together at the hands of the Indians of the Parana River region. English readers may remember that in Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! this story is related by Don Guzman, the Spaniard captured by Amyas Leigh and held for ransom in Devon, as an example of the devotion and courage of his countrymen.

For the traditional life of the Argentine pampas, Ricardo Güiraldes's novel Don Segundo Sombra will long remain a modern classic. It has been called the South American Huckleberry Finn; and in its portrayal of boyhood and youth in the cattle country it has, for all its exotic background and Latin spirit, qualities that justify the comparison. Don Segundo is the philosophical old gaucho under whom the boy who has fled from his home to escape restrictions and monotony serves his apprenticeship as herdsman and for whom he has unwavering reverence and affection. A story thread is entwined in the vivid, roughcast chronicle of the hard work on the pampas, the casual loves, the friends and associates and adventures of the wandering young herdsman, who comes at last to his own family rights and assured well-being. Unusual in warmth and rich human vitality, charm and delicacy are here, in spite of brutality and harshness and rough realism of speech. This is one of the South American novels that linger in memory as do the books of W. H. Hudson.

Don Segundo Sombra is linked in such illuminating relationship with Martín Fierro, the famous folk ballad of the gaucho, by José Hemandez, that a word should be said of that national epic of the Argentine. Hemandez's poem, of which the first part was published in 1872 and the second part seven years later, both immortalizes and symbolizes the gaucho, in the figure of Martín Fierro, who, as Walter Owen says, stepped out of its pages "to become the embodiment of his hardships and rugged virtues, the champion of his wrongs, the spokesman of his class for social justice." It is a verse narrative of gaucho life, mingling the epic and the lyric, redolent of the pampas, of the rank, pristine living of plain and outpost, of round-up, and cattle brand, and Indian raid. A series of vivid, authentic pictures of a life and a time now past, it challenges the government practice of forced recruiting, the official corruption and injustice of which the plainsmen were victims. Translated by Walter Owen into English verse that is designed to keep the chanting, ballad form of the original, it was published in a limited English edition in 1935 and in facsimile American issue a year later, and it should be known and enjoyed by many English readers.

Varied aspects of Argentina's literary art, as of its life and backgrounds, are revealed in Waldo Frank's volume Tales from the Argentine. Here are gathered seven stories by writers who were masters in their fields, reflecting conditions and scenes that are now part of the country's past. These tales open vistas of the tangled jungles, of the primitive villages of the pampas, of the secret wild creatures of the great rivers and the forest wilderness; they depict different human types, the gaucho, the vagabond, the dwellers in country towns; and they convey the color and fever of life in Buenos Aires during the stormy days of the past. Most original and fascinating is the story that closes the volume: "The Return of Anaconda," by Horacio Quiroga, native Uruguayan, who is the leading Argentine short story writer of today. This is a little masterpiece of fantastic, imaginative conception: the tale of the strong and beautiful young serpent, Anaconda, who leads a rebellion of the jungle against man, the intruder, sweeping down through her vast hunting grounds on the turbulent flood waters of the mighty river, swollen and irresistible after the deluge of rain; only to meet disaster through the overpowering force on which she had planned her triumph.

Last in this gleaning is Uruguay, represented by a selection of Quiroga's remarkable short stories and by one novel in English translation. This, Castanets, is the work of Carlos Reyles, leading novelist of the Rio de La Plata region; but it is Spanish, not South American, in theme and setting: a swift, passionate tale of prewar Seville, exhaling the traditional atmosphere of bullfight and dance.