Dos Muertes en una Vida
If, as the European papers noted
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If, as the European papers noted when the novel first appeared on the scene, Dos Muertes en una Vida was the most successful novel to come out of modern Ecuador, Mama Zoila establishes the reputation of Alfonso Barrera Valverde as a major literary voice in Latin America. As America Indigena said of Dos Muertes en una Vida, Mama Zoila "presents the social-economic reality of a marginal population," but whereas Dos Muertes en una Vida focused on indigenous peoples of rural Ecuador, Mama Zoila deals with the country's urban population that exists in the marginalia of an Ecuador that is finding its way through its version of social modernity. And by the time we have encountered and come to know the simple, sweet, fatalistic Mama Zoila and the sons who have embraced a more modern, more sour, and far less pure experience of reality, we have also come to know the psychological tensions and priorities that inform modern Ecuador and an elaboration of a modernist ethos.The most important thematic achievement of Mama Zoila is that Barrera Valverde uncovers at once the mysterious bleakness and the almost mystical hopefulness of attitude, meaning, and experience in an environment hitherto unexplored by Latin American literature. The demanding pall of bleakness so overlays the action of the novel that one is surprised, at the end, at how seductively uplifting, almost comforting, the novel has been to read. We witness self-seeking, status-seeking civil servants unwittingly respond
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ization in ineluctable transition from a preindustrial rural society to a society that embraces the driven hardness of modern culture parallels Faulkner's cautionary tales charting the replacement of the antiquated but nonetheless charming social values of the Old South by the valueless, "regionless" society of the modern era. A bit like Faulkner's Jason Compson, Barrera Valverde's Doctor Ruperto seems welded to a squalid, emotionally bankrupt modernism. Ruperto's modernism, as Barrera Valverde spins the tale, is undeniably and rather sadly the wave of Ecuador's future. Like Faulkner, too, Barrera Valverde appropriates the accidentals of death to explore attitudes toward and experiences of life and the responsibilities that derive from the very existence of human relationships. In As I Lay Dying, the action is driven by the need to bury a matriarch, and in Mama Zoila it is driven by the need to lay a patriarch's long-dead bones to permanent rest.
Yet there are differences. Barrera Valverde's observations of life and experience in the barrio, made through a peripheral narrator whose experience of life is decisively modern and who yet wishes to understand the way of life in an earlier, less complex era, make a strong connection wit
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Approximate Word count = 1637
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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