Novel
El problema
Not translated into English
Máximo Soto Hall · 1899
Synopsis
In 1927, in what was then a near future, the action takes place in the imaginary towns of New Charleston and San Rafael, near the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, where United States influence is spreading across the isthmus. Julio Escalante, son of a family of the oligarchy, confronts Mr. Crissey, the American engineer whom his uncle Tomás has hired for a stretch of railway, while the family's cacao leaves for the United States and its business spreads into Honduras.
Context
The novel appeared in 1899 in San José, from the widow Lines's printing workshop, a year after the Spanish-American War of 1898. It immediately provoked a controversy: some read in it an inevitable prophecy, others a warning to the societies of the isthmus, and one critic interpreted it in 1904 as a hymn to the Saxon race. It went through at least four editions, in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala and Chile, before being rediscovered in the eighties.
Who it is for
In Spanish. The novel reads as a work of anticipation and assumes familiarity with the rivalries over the isthmus at the end of the nineteenth century.
Prizes and reception
Unearthed by Álvaro Quesada Soto and Juan Durán Luzio, it is regarded as the first anti-imperialist novel in Latin America, a claim others dispute.