yangzhibin

This is a Brazilian novel (set in early/mid 1900s perhaps?) written in 1967 by the prize winning Dourado. The story is quite simple being the strange love affair between Rosalina and Jose. She is a lonely isolated virgin daughter of a once powerful Colonel Cota. She lives alone with her speechless maid Quiquina in the family home outside the village. Jose is a young one-eyed travelling mulatto, a liar and a chancer but nonetheless a likeable rogue - so Jose and Rosalina are opposites but are secretly drawn by each others needs and background. The dynamic of the story comes in part due the histories of Rosalina and Jose. She is isolated from the town because years previously Cota failed to gain political backing from the locals and abandoned each other; Rosalina's only friend is Emanuel an ex-love. Jose is sort of running away from an affair/love which lead to him being run out of another town and he keeps re-imagining the events and his role in them. Will Rosalina and Jose eventually get it on and will the inevitable happen if they do? The style is not magical realism though the ending gets a bit surreal; but there is that haunting atrractive Latin-American narrative mode with voice of the towns people as narrator occasionally appearing. The tale relies a bit on repetition such as the near constant reference to clocks being stopped as Cota's family members die, or how bad Cota's father was, or Jose's one eye but these events act as a captivating thread. A quote: "His body was simply a body to her. They conversed only with their bodies, only their silent bodies were in tune. Because her mind and her eyes were denied him. They belonged to the dead"

2023-07-05 21:17