Novel
A la costa
Not translated into English
Luis A. Martínez · 1904
Synopsis
Quito, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the liberal revolution sets the country against itself. Salvador Ramírez, a passive student, son of a middle-class lawyer, befriends Luciano Pérez at university, the son of landowners with liberal ideas, who falls in love with his sister Mariana; the conservative family forbids them to see him again. When the father dies, the Ramírez family falls into hardship and breaks apart, and Salvador, with no future in the sierra, goes down to the coast to work on a cocoa plantation.
Context
The novel appeared in 1904. A liberal who had spent time on the coastal plantations, its author sets the conservative, devout highlands against the coast turned towards the cacao trade, and Galo René Pérez regarded it as the antipode of Cumandá, the work of his father-in-law: religion, education and regional rivalries are seen in it through liberal eyes. The Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana reissued it in 1946, Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica in Madrid in 1992, and the channel Ecuavisa made a series from it, directed by Carl West.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French or English translation. It helps to know that the sierra means the high Andean country and the costa the coast.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's major work and as one of the first realist novels of Ecuador; Ángel Felicísimo Rojas counted it among the greatest novels of the country.
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