September 1959
This is a Mexican novel set in the south of that country showing the disintegration of the landed families under the growing rebelliousness of the Indians inflamed by the ideals and agrarian reforms of President Lazaro Cardenas. It takes place in the thirties, and the story is largely told by the daughter of one of these families, a child of seven who makes the journey with her family from the provincial town where they live to the country where the Arguellos have their great sugar and cattle farm.
This is enough information: the book is not social history, but a novel - a poetic one - which is to say that by giving layers of rich and striking impressions the picture of a world is made - strange, universal and ageless. The result is a beautiful and satisfying book which one feels has lost nothing by its translation.
I was chiefly struck by the permeation of the idea of hierarchy: this is a feudal society, with the landowners at the top and the Indians at the bottom; the child’s father sees himself as a brutal realist who knows how to get what he wants, which is to preserve a status quo: but the gap between him and his Indian serfs is so great that there is plenty of room for the Government officials to act within it, so that by the end of the book he is a realist about a situation which no longer exists. Then there is the hierarchy of wisdom, faith and superstition: the Arguello family are, of course, Catholic, but the child’s mother is so ignorant of and indifferent to the Indians that it is only their superstition which strikes her and which she catches like a disease, while the child’s nurse, an old Indian woman, has collected wisdom to dignify her faith, and her superstition is relegated to wholly suitable objects - like motor cars. This idea seems to run right through the book - but there is not room here to expose more than two aspects of it; for the rest there is to me a peculiar joy in recognising these people, who usually remain a foreign blur in one’s imagination.
The author uses language without ever allowing it to use her, and that a young writer should avoid this elemental trap is surely a sign of promise and grace. I look forward to her next book.