Author: Horacio Quiroga
Genre: Classics,
First published 1921
Book description: The human being is a danger for the snakes and for the jungle and, for this reason, one of them summons the vipers and the snakes to an assembly in which he reveals to them that man lives in the vicinity...
If the short story reaches in Latin America from modernism onwards to major genre characters, Horacio Quiroga, consul for many years in the Argentine province of Misiones, stands out among his contemporaries for the universal dimension of his work and for his ability to explore in depth the formal and thematic possibilities of the story. For Julio Cortázar, "brother Quiroga" is among the few narrators capable of both writing tensely and showing intensely, the only way for "an effective story to hit the reader and stick in memory." Halfway between the epigones of modernism and the innovators of contemporary storytelling, between decadent aestheticism and exacerbated naturalism, the stories of Horacio Quiroga, beyond the traces left by Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov or Rudyard Kipling, They have the profound originality of their own obsessive literary universe, where the danger of a world of jungles, poisonous reptiles, beasts, fevers and suffocating heat joins the threat of a dark reign of madness and aberration, of shadows and nightmares.
Thus, each Anaconda story is an amazing labyrinth where man struggles with death and the reader with humor, surprise and horror.
Review:
It is a peculiar story; making the reader learn to appreciate reptiles like the Venomous snakes which is a difficult thing to do. But I think it's even more difficult to make such a compelling story out of the interaction of man and snakes. I would love for more stories to have the human as an adversary and destroyer.
From the start this story invokes the atmospheric hot Argentine coast, to get to know the land and especially the fauna; which at the same time is intimately related and in different ways with Humanity. There is no lack of everydayness in his stories, which seems to me to be one of the richest and most commendable aspects of his writing. But above all, it is a nice book to read calmly and attentively because inevitably one will find themselves acknowledging the danger that the human species represents for animals and the entire earth.
It’s a reminder not to forget the relationship that we must respect and honor between species living on the same planet.
In any case, it is a story about the fight against nature. I asked myself several times if man, if we were in harmony with it, would still be the man antagonist.
This is a very good example of Quiroga's works.
This was used for challenges:
Classics
Around the world: Uruguay
Latin/Spanish works
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