Arguedas

Warma Kuyay is a love story written from the eyes of a 14 year old boy. For some reason it reminds me so much of McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses- in the description of the gorge and the ranch and the sky. Also in the point of view of the young boy and the way he relates to the land and the animals. Arguedas does a spot on job of translating that feeling of loving someone so much and knowing that you can't be with them- the feeling that tears are not enough and your heart is ready to burst. When Ernesto is finally overtaken by remorse for the calf he watched Kutu viciously beat we see almost a coming of age and also an embodiment of his love for Justinita. He stands up to Kutu and is, in the end, left in his comfortable loneliness at the hacienda.

There are some very interesting social and racial questions brought up by this story. Ernesto loves Justinita who is an Indian but he is very aware that Kutu is an Indian as well and does not understand why Justinita would choose Kutu as her lover over him. He has been raised by the Indians on the hacienda just like a child would be raised by servants and nannies in some places and yet he isn't an Indian. He seems stuck in the middle and does not identify wholly with either the Indians or Don Froylan or the other white ranch owners. And he hates Don Froylan for abusing his power and raping Justinita. We can see the strange power dynamic especially between Kutu and Ernesto. They are clearly friends and care about each other and yet Kutu treats Ernesto in a very subservient way. He offers him Justinita and leaves the ranch when Ernesto tells him to.

The Pongo's Dream has a very different style. It reads almost like a parable. It's easy to see how Arguedas would have been involved in the peasant movements. It's interesting in regard to both stories that Arguedas learned Quechua from the servants when he was young and must have been very close with them.

Pedro Paramo

The first few pages of this novel had me captivated. I think we can immediately identify with the romanticizing of a place we have never been but only heard stories about. After his mother's death, Juan goes to fulfill his promise to her by traveling to Comala- the town of her childhood which he believes to be a beautiful place, to find his estranged father. But once he sees it over the horizon, he realizes that it is not the beautiful enchanted town his mother described but literally a ghost town in the desert haunted by its former inhabitants. Awesome. From the very beginning when the man who leads Juan to Comala replies to Juan's comment that it looks like a ghost town with, casually, yeah, everyone here is long dead... there is a feeling of eerieness.

The first two things I noticed about this novel were it's obvious element of unreality existing beside reality. In the first few pages we meet both the innkeeper who explains to Juan casually that his mother had told her that he would be arriving, and the man who directed him to her house. The innkeeper insists that the burro is dead but seems unphased by Juan's conversation with him. We are led to wonder if the innkeeper herself may be dead and just not realize it. We also get our first story about Juan's mother and Comala

Rulfo's narrative style in Pedro Paramo is very interesting and at times confusing. Juan begins the narration, but soon we hear a sort of omniscient narrator tell us about Pedro Paramo's life. There also seems to be some sort of narrative dialogue going on between Juan and some other entity. This narrative style compliments the overall sparse and fragmentary structure of the whole novel. But even as sparse as his writing style seems, we still get a very rich picture of the town of Comala and of Juan's mother and Pedro Paramo's lives. Rulfo's writing has this great gothic feel within a modernist style or structure. It reminded me of New Islands in that sense. Also in that as I read it, I was not sure what was real or what was fantasy or perception. But in Pedro Paramo, the characters are, indeed, ghosts.

Bombal- New Islands

The first story in New Islands- The Final Mist was really incredible and a great introduction to Bombal, I think. In it she exposes a lot of the themes central to her writing- our relationship to nature, sexuality, alienation from our sexuality and from nature, patriarchal social norms like marriage(even to your cousin). Her writing style is so interesting. Even when she is not writing in first person, which is rare, she appears to be. She changes tenses and perspectives and stops to meditate often and in strange places. She speaks through her punctuation and it affects her tone incredibly. Her writing has a very stream-of-consciousness feel to it even though she maintains a story. It isn't character driven in a typical way, though we are always inside the protagonists head. It is about what events mean.

Her writing is so erotic... I imagine it was fairly shocking for the time and a definite signature of feminism and sexual empowerment. It was interesting to me though that while she clearly considers herself a feminist writer, her female characters seem, in the end, to need saved by a man. Or at least to be in such pain because they lack the love of a man. Also, out of curiosity I looked up a picture of her and was surprised to find that she had a very mod haircut and a total lack of "braids." She must have chosen not be tethered to the earth like she believes all females must be.


I thought it was interesting that even though The Final Mist and The Tree were so similar in subject matter, nature did not signify the same thing. In The Final Mist, the woman seems to be at war with nature- the fog, the lake(though she feels at home there, it also kills the gardener and keeps her from knowing the truth about the stranger), the storms. She finds solace in the warm bedrooms of the stranger's home and Daniel's where the outside is shrouded in fog and silence. In The Tree Brigida feels comforted by the tapping of the rubber tree. Though I guess, in the end, it was blocking the too-bright light from her dressing room and actually protecting her from the outside as well.

The Final Mist reminded me of a noir film or novel... Bombal is so dark. It's definitely a beautiful dark, but incredibly pessimistic. Just the final paragraph of The Final Mist was so sad.

"Following him toward an infinity of insignificant tasks; toward a thousand trifling amusements; following him to live correctly- to cry from habit and smile
out of duty; following him to die, one day, correctly.

Around us the fog settles over everything like a shroud."