Books by José Eustasio Rivera

“It’s another one of our classics. It’s a fantastic book. It’s about a lady and a man who run away. First, they go to the Llanos Orientales, a place in the centre of Colombia which is huge and wild. They end up disappearing into the jungle and getting swallowed up by it. It’s an adventure novel, but it’s also about the struggle of the indigenous people during the Amazon rubber boom. It’s a very painful novel, because it tells us how the indigenous peoples of those areas of Colombia became slaves during the rubber boom…La vorágine is very realistic. What I like most about the book is its description of Colombian nature—of the jungle, the skies, the rivers—which is very important to me as a writer. Along with Jorge Isaacs, the author of María, he was a master at this. They were important teachers for me in how to write about the nature that surrounds me. They notice it. They were able to see the nature around them with the eyes of a foreigner, which is to be amazed by it…It’s the story of a man who is running away from the life that he has to live and looking for his own destiny. He’s not a good man. He’s an outcast and a renegade. I like it also because of that: it’s a dark, dark novel, set in a dark place with a dark character, who is not a hero. He’s an anti-hero. But when he sees the reality of those people suffering, he starts changing.” Read more...

The Best Colombian Novels

Pilar Quintana, Novelist