Country Judge {Un Juez Rural) is an autobiographical novel. As the story opens we find the protagonist Solaguren (Prado) surrounded by his family, just as I described the author's home in 1932:

Pedro Prado, with his wife and children, lives in a large country house in a remote suburb of Santiago near the railroad station. It is a peaceful house: many trees, fountains, a tower, old storerooms—a house that for more than 250 years has belonged to the family. The rooms are spacious and tastefully furnished with old pieces, modern paintings, rare and curious books, books everywhere. The house has many rooms, all of which have windows facing the Andes, to admit the mountain air and the light the poet loves. The fountains murmur, a few leaves fall, and the silence is broken only by the brief and nervous song of a diuca. In the evening the poet and his friends stroll in the garden to watch the moon rising over the wall of the patio, its light shining through the leaves of the grape arbor.

{Novelistas contemporáneos de América, 1939).

It was in this house that Prado wrote Country Judge, which, despite its modest length, is a significant landmark in the literary history of Chile. Solaguren, like Prado an architect, is a melancholy and thoughtful man.

He feels himself smothered in the cotton-wool of his too-peaceful life, and to escape it he accepts a judgeship in a rural suburb of Santiago. An equally compelling motive is a romantic urge to put into practice his own notions of justice, or, perhaps, of esthetics. Like Sancho Panza on his Island, Solaguren knows nothing of the law, but, again like Sancho, his sense of fitness and his humor lead him to pronounce sentences which appeal, not only to his pedantic little Secretary (who, incidentally, is one of the most incisively drawn figures of the book), but certainly also to the reader.

Prado squeezes the last bit of juice out of the courtroom scenes. The odd assortment of litigants and their foolish cases gives him a broad canvas on which to depict humanity in all its depravity and occasional nobility. Many of the scenes are hilarious, others are poignant, and all are drawn with sharpness and economy. The dialogue is equally spare and equally effective. In a word, Prado is a writer.

As time goes on, Solaguren makes the inevitable discovery that the administration of justice is a very complex matter and that it is quite beyond his power to interpret and solve the human problems brought to his court. Indeed, he has been assailed by doubts since the first day of his tenure. He is, moreover, depressed by the general sordidness and ugliness of the courtroom. Luckily, he has a friend, the painter Mozarena, with whom he escapes to the country in between sessions. These excursions supply a kind of counterpoint to the main theme. The two friends, the painter and the poet-philosopher, see the landscape in its great beauty, its delicacy, its rawness, and its macabre contrasts. And they talk. They talk about everything and they talk exceedingly well, in the Cervantean tradition. Nothing is too trivial, nothing too vast, for their exploring minds. But they solve none of Solaguren's problems, and one gets the feeling that they are thrashing about in a vacuum.

The judge returns to his courtroom in a deepening melancholy. He sees himself, not as a judge, but as an arm of the police, his sole function being to mete out punishment. This is so at odds with his original purpose that he resigns his post in a letter to the governor, in which he examines the nature of justice itself and admits his defeat. This letter (in Chapter 19) is the high point of the book and the best of Prado's writing.

After his crisis Solaguren slips off into a kind of dream world, a flight into unreality. He runs away to the seaside, where he is driven frantic by the vapid life of the vacationers. Two months of this, and he escapes again, this time back to the city. Needless to say, he finds no peace there either. On the contrary, its dust, dirt, and hurly-burly are as unendurable as life at the beach. Even his friend Mozarena deserts him and retreats into domesticity. So the judge makes a final flight to his empty house and utter loneliness.