Puerto Rico (United States) / All works
Novel
The Pond
La charca
Manuel Zeno Gandía · 1894
Synopsis
In the coffee-growing zone of the mountains of Puerto Rico, at the end of the nineteenth century, under Spanish rule, the novel interweaves several parallel destinies. The day labourers live in poverty, exploited by the landowners and by the merchant Andújar; Silvina is the victim of men and of her mother, while Juan del Salto, the author's spokesman, ponders reforms, alongside the local priest and doctor. Nature itself plays a part in it.
Context
Written in Ponce, where the author practised medicine, the novel appeared in 1894. It is the best known of the four volumes of the Crónicas de un mundo enfermo, which the Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico holds to be the most important work of Puerto Rican naturalism. The title designates a milieu of vice, corruption and stagnation, and the plot, broken into parallel episodes, gives an equal share to each. Kal Wagenheim translated it into English under the title The Pond.
Who it is for
For reading the great naturalist novel of Puerto Rico, an unvarnished portrait of the coffee mountains.
Prizes and reception
It is held to be the greatest Puerto Rican novel of the nineteenth century, and sometimes the island's first novel.
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