Novel
Toá, narraciones de caucherías
Not translated into English
César Uribe Piedrahíta · 1933
Synopsis
Antonio de Orrantia, a twenty-five-year-old doctor, leaves Bogotá for the rubber plantations of Caquetá and Putumayo, charged with a report for the government. He crosses the cordillera, reaches the rivers and travels downstream from agency to agency. What he finds has nothing of the adventure he had imagined: the forced labour of the Indians, the punishments, the rigged accounts that keep them in debt for life. He falls in love with Toá, a young Indian woman, and finds himself facing his own prejudices. When the other Colombians decide to withdraw upriver before the Peruvian advance, he chooses to continue downstream.
Context
The book came out in 1933, the year after the seizure of Leticia by Peruvian agents and during the conflict that diplomacy would settle in 1934. Its author had travelled up the rivers of the Amazon on his own account to study snake venom, and what he saw there of the rubber operations changed his journey. It came off the presses of the Manizales publisher who two years later issued Risaralda, by Bernardo Arias Trujillo, in one hundred and eighty pages, with a prologue, sketches and a note. It is perhaps the first Colombian book to describe a yajé ceremony.
Who it is for
Two hundred pages in Spanish, with no French translation. The vocabulary of the forest and the rubber trades is dense, and the narrative is as much a mission report as a novel.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the great novels of the Latin American forest, it never had the circulation of La vorágine, from 1924, and waited ninety years for a reissue.
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