yet we find something like satisfaction, too. Writing in Madrid's El Pais, Julio Aristides cites the emotional impact of the characters' silence, which, curiously enough, inheres in the formation of "the principle, the origin of the word." Most silent and fatalistic of all is of course Mama Zoila herself, in whom J.L. Castillo Puche, in A.B.C. Madrid, discerned "a beauty in literature, warm, live, exceptional quality [sic] within the actual promotion of the Spanish American novel. Telluric creation, recreation of characters in skin and bones during the course of the myth, the consecration for art of long suffering people."
It is in the juxtaposition of squalor and hope that Barrera Valverde stakes out a territory of optimism in Latin American literature that is distinct from the exuberant cynicism of Vargas Llosa or the programmatic pessimism of Garcia Marquez. And Barrera Valverde is no less precise in his understanding of the myriad insular communities that both separate and unify modern Ecuador than is Jorge Amado in his understanding of the peculiar amalgam and historiography of communities and castes in Brasil. Other comparisons have been m
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