Paperback: 216 pages
Publisher: Markus Wiener Pub; 1st Markus Wiener Publishers Ed edition May 1999
Language: English
ISBN-10: 155876092X
ISBN-13: 978-1558760929
Product Dimensions:
8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
Product Review
"A classic of Latin American fiction [in] a modern and colloquial translation. . . . " -- The Nation
"A classic of Latin American fiction [in] a modern and colloquial translation. . . . " -- The Nation
Product Description
Before the turn of the century, while the rich in Madrid, Paris and Rome capped their sumptuous dinners with sips of Puerto Rico's exquisite black café, the anemic men, women and children who harvested the precious crop lived in squalid huts and rarely saw a scrap of meat. Brutalized by grinding poverty, theirs was the harsh world of Manuel Zeno-Gandia's La Charca, published in 1894, and widely acknowledged as the first major novel to emerge from Puerto Rico. In the colloquial Spanish of Puerto Rico's hill country, una charca is a stagnant pond, a body of brackish water. Puerto Rico's Spanish colonial society, says Zeno-Gandia, was an immense charca of human beings, oppressed by poverty, ignorance and disease. His bitter melodrama offers stark contrasts: the beautiful Puerto Rican countryside, a veritable Garden of Eden; yet within that "regal panorama" starved, diseased human beings clung desperately to life.
