This moving navel captures the trials of El Salvador during the first three decades of this century, setting the stage for the tragedies of the last twenty years. Fast-paced, yet poetic, this epic novel is a monument to the people of El Salvador and a page turner that invites no interruption.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
El Salvador from 1870 through the 1930s is the setting for this sprawling populist mural of a novel. The title refers to an earthquake that creates a volcanic mound where Romilia Vasquez, a strong woman of Indian peasant stock born during the quake, later tills the land. No surprise, the (somewhat idealized) traditional ways of indigenous peoples, including the communitarian ethic of the campesinos, are pulverized as big landowners sell out to imperialistic U.S., German and British corporations, which then dispossess whole communities and tear down forests to grow coffee for export. In telling his tale of exploitation, Villatoro, who has published stories in both English and Spanish in a variety of small literary magazines, evinces special empathy for the plight of women, particularly Romilia, whose wealthy, crude husband, Patricio Colonez, treats her like a possession, and Necira Reyes, who's kidnapped and forced to undergo a brutal abortion because her father and brothers don't want her to have a child with Indian blood. Sketching characters broadly, Villatoro follows Romilia's son, Paco, as he joins his communist comrades in New York and returns to El Salvador to lead a workers' uprising that is brutally crushed by machine gun-toting government-backed troops. This is not a novel of character but rather an imaginative testimony on behalf of an entire people.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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