Cumboto

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Díaz Sánchez, Ramón, spa, author.

Contributor:

Upton, John, Translator.

Series:

Texas Pan American Series

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 p.)

Place of Publication:

University of Texas Press 2013

Summary:

This richly orchestrated novel, which won a national literary prize in the author's native land, Venezuela, also earned international recognition when the William Faulkner Foundation gave it an award as the most notable novel published in Ibero America between 1945 and 1962.Cumboto's disturbing story unfolds during the early decades of the twentieth century on a Venezuelan coconut plantation, in a turbulent Faulknerian double world of black and white. It records the lives of Don Federico, the effete survivor of a once vigorous family of landowners, and his Negro servant Natividad, who since the days of their mutual childhood has been his only friend.Young Federico, psychologically impotent and lost to human contact, lives on as a lonely recluse in the century-old main house of "Cumboto," surrounded by descendants of African slaves who still manage, despite his apathy, to keep the plantation on its feet. Natividad's heroic and selfless struggle to redeem his friend by awakening him to the stirrings of the earth and life about him sets in motion a series of events that are to shatter Federico's childlike world: a headlong love affair with a voluptuous black girl, her terrified flight in the face of the bitter condemnation of her own people, and the unexpected appearance, twenty years later, of their extraordinary son.Throughout the novel runs a recurring theme: neither race can survive without the other. Black and white, Díaz Sánchezz suggests, embody contrasting aspects of human nature, which are not inimical but complementary: the languid intellectualism of European culture must be tempered with the indestructible vitality and intuition of the African soul if humanity is ever fully to comprehend the living essence of the world.

Contents:

Frontmatter

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

CONTENTS

PART ONE: AN ENCHANTED WORLD

1. Meeting at Dusk

2. A Primitive and Passionate World

3. The White House

4. Frau Berza Has a Secret

5. The Path of the Blue Donkeys

6. Grandmother Anita

PART TWO: THE MARK OF SATAN

7. The Silver Spade

8. The Devil's Business-in Black and White

9. The Death of El Matacan

10. The Bird Man's Stories

11. The Flesh and the Spirit

12. The Highest of All Powers

13. Phantoms

PART THREE: LET THERE BE LIGHT

14. Strange People

15. More Strange People

16. Are You Happy Now, Dear Ghost?

17. Walk!

18. The Shadow

19. June

20. Let There Be Light

PART FOUR: FURY

21. The Tempest

22. Delirium

23. Grandmother Anita's Trunk

24. Madness

25. The Messenger

Glossary

ISBN:

0-292-75329-2

OCLC:

1475128500