“I THINK everyone in this country…has a dream hidden away in their heads, the secret dream of land, a small plot of land that makes them feel secure, a hidden reserve against the thousand misfortunes that might happen.” So says Pilar Ángel, one of three siblings who are the narrators of “La Oculta”, a new novel by Héctor Abad Faciolince, one of Colombia’s leading writers.
La Oculta (“The Hideaway”) is the Ángels’ 150-year-old family farm in Antoquia, Colombia’s most entrepreneurial and conservative province. Mr Abad’s finely crafted novel not only expounds its narrators’ contrasting attitudes towards sex, rural life and tradition in a modernising country, but also tells in fictional form the true story of an attempt to create a rural middle class in Colombia. In doing so, it throws an evocative light on the enduring pull of the land in Latin America—and the undercurrent of violence that has gone with it.
Conflict over land is the region’s oldest story, dating to before the Iberian conquest. This installed a uniquely unequal pattern of landholding, sustained by serfdom and slavery. That lies at the root of the region’s inequality, and...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1bi8c83
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