Música de Zorros. (Foxes’ Music)

Reviewed by Carlos Rodríguez Martorell, East Elmhurst, NY -- Críticas, 7/15/2008

Vargas, Manuel.
Bolivia: Correveidile, dist. by Bolivia Books. 2008. 218p. ISBN 978-00005-889-7-2. pap. $12. FICTION

An impoverished indigenous peasant, Jacinto Quiroz (aka Don Zorro,) is the hero of this moving story about the Bolivian pampa. Quiroz is an orphan raised by his aunt and his cousin, with whom he falls in love. As a young man, his mother, a poor hacienda cook kidnapped and raped by the patrón, tells Quiroz in an apparition to “find his way.” Quiroz thus embarks on a trip throughout the country that will take up the rest of his life. Several narrators account for Quiroz’s story, bringing into play historical references (the Chaco War of the 30s and the first Indian Congress of 1945), Quechua legends (sacras or devils, mayuk’alas or drowned women), and both real and fictional places (Sucre, Pueblo Encantado) . Tapping into both costumbrism and the fantastic genre, Vargas also leaves much of the story to the reader’s interpretation. Is Quiroz, who often has visions in which he can even hear animals talk, dreaming everything? At one point, he suspects he has killed a man but he is not certain whether he did it or not. As in his brilliant Nocturno Paceño (“La Paz by Night”), devoted to Bolivia’s capital, Vargas builds vivid, suggestive scenes, like the initial ones devoted to the cerros (mountains), those “huge bodies of soil.” Unfortunately, the author’s inventive seems to vanish as soon as Quiroz undertakes his epic trip and encounters an array of insubstantial characters (a crooked doctor, his servant, more peasants). Halfway trough the novel, it seems the author had not much in store for his character. Recommended for libraries and bookstores interested in Bolivian contemporary fiction.

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