Novel
The Vortex
La vorágine
José Eustasio Rivera · 1924
Opening lines
Antes que me hubiera apasionado por mujer alguna, jugué mi corazón al azar y me lo ganó la Violencia.
Before I had fallen in love with any woman, I gambled my heart on chance and Violence won it.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from es.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Arturo Cova flees Bogotá with Alicia, whom he cannot marry. They reach the llanos of the Orinoco, where life is harsh and men are brutal; Alicia leaves with a recruiter. Cova goes after her deep into the forest and discovers the rubber camps: tappers, often Indians, held by a system of debts from which no one escapes, bled by the bosses like the trees they cut. He keeps going, and the forest closes in.
Context
Its author had been the lawyer of a boundary commission sent towards Venezuela, which took him through the rubber-producing regions: disappointed by the means his government gave him, he left the commission and continued alone, and saw at close quarters the system of debt that held the workers. The book appeared in 1924 and its author revised it up to the fifth edition, to correct what critics regarded as weaknesses of style. Horacio Quiroga, a great writer of the forest, hailed it at once. It was brought to the screen in Mexico in 1949.
Who it is for
A novel in three parts, with a rich language. The Amazonian part is the strongest and the most documentary. A French translation exists, but it dates from 1951 and is hard to find.
Prizes and reception
Translated into some twenty languages, on the Colombian school curriculum, and counted among the great novels of the forest.