The Pond (La Charca) (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781558760929)

Before the turn of the century, while the rich in Madrid, Paris and Rome capped their sumptuous dinners with sips of Puerto Rico's exquisite black caf , the anemic men, women and children who harvested the precious crop lived in squalid huts and rarely saw a scrap of meat. Brutalized by grinding poverty, theirs was the harsh world of Manuel Zeno-Gandia's La Charca, published in 1894 and widely acknowledged as the first major novel to emerge from Puerto Rico. In the colloquial Spanish of Puerto Rico's hill-country, una charca is a stagnant pond, a body of brackish water. Puerto Rico's Spanish colonial society, says Zeno-Gandia, was an immense charca of human beings, oppressed by poverty, ignorance and disease. His bitter melodrama offers stark contrasts: the beautiful Puerto Rican countryside, a veritable Garden of Eden; yet within that "regal panorama," starved, diseased human beings clung desperately to life.

Author: Manuel Zeno-Gandia
ISBN-10: 155876092X
ISBN-13: 9781558760929
Publisher: Markus Wiener Publishers
Language: English
Published: 10/01/2009
Pages: 222
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.63lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.51d