Volume 12, Number 10 · May 22, 1969
Tristes Tropiques
By V.S. Pritchett
Strong Wind
by Miguel Angel Asturias
Delacorte, 256 pp., $6.95
The Green House
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Harper & Row, 405 pp., $6.95
On its polite and somehow always politic annual round, the Nobel Prize was given in 1967 to Miguel Angel Asturias, who is known as an important Guatemalan diplomat and a sensitive novelist of the older generation. Strong Wind is the first volume, the publisher tells us, of his Banana Republic trilogy. It is nervously described as 'controversial'—surely no one is still frightened of upsetting American fruit companies! How far the story of colonialist finance, etc., is ultimately analyzed, we can't yet tell in the English version. In the present volume, the theme appears to be that the early planters did something bold, romantic, epic, and humanly valuable; but that their successors, the American financial operators, have dehumanized an economy and reduced human beings to the condition of a crop that has the mere precarious value of a foreign investment. To guarantee the steady return from a product liable to disease or glut there must be monopoly: the foreign worker is strapped to the machine and is supposed to like this as much as people in Chicago do. He doesn't, because he has lost control of his own way of life. If some eccentric rebels—as occurs in this book—and tries to break the monopoly, gangster action is introduced to stop him. The only force stronger than all parties is Nature, in the form of tropical disease, ruinous heat, and hurricane.
Review, 1898 words
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