Novel
Risaralda
Not translated into English
Bernardo Arias Trujillo · 1935
Synopsis
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Black people from the Cauca go up the river and settle in the Risaralda valley, where they found a hamlet they call Sopinga. Pacha Durán keeps the inn there where people dance on Saturdays, and keeps her daughter away from trade: she wants her married to a white man. Then come the colonists from Antioquia, led by a patriarch who intends to develop the valley and put the Black people to work. Among them arrives Juan Manuel Vallejo, a boy who left home to escape his father's punishment, who looks for work and meets the innkeeper's daughter.
Context
The book grew out of the author's stays at La Virginia, as the guest of a friend whose family had colonised the valley. It appeared in 1935 from Arturo Zapata, in Manizales, and was at once a critical and commercial success. The subtitle presents it as a film in two reels and in the Castilian language, and the book is built accordingly: a black block, a white block. The author lets his characters speak in their own language, which was new; today's criticism shows that this speech also serves to accuse them, and that the machete duels are archetype more than observation. The name Sopinga was judged by the authorities to be of notorious savagery and without Castilian meaning.
Who it is for
Two hundred pages in Spanish, with no French translation. The prose is laden with metaphors and the characters' speech is transcribed; the depictions of Black people in it are dated and read as a document.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's major work and as one of the important Colombian novels of the early twentieth century, in the wake of La vorágine.