Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Orphaned and alone, young Juan Caraveo flees from his cruel master in the lowlands of central Mexico to seek his missing father in the fabled mountains of the west. Fear and necessity drive him into the service of thieves and adventurers, wise men and holy men D all characters who emerge, bigger than life, from the rugged and varied Mexican landscape to guide or confound his quest.
From the Publisher
As the publisher of Snowy Egret, the oldest U.S. journal of nature writing, I had been delighted to accept and publish a story of surpassing beauty and high adventure from a Mexican writer of whom I'd never heard, a man named James Hinton. Subsequently, I received a heavy package from the same author, containing a four hundred page manuscript entitled Juan Caraveo. Surprised by this submission, for surely Mr. Hinton was aware that we didn't publish manuscripts of such length in Snowy Egret, I nonetheless couldn't restrain myself from reading a work that I suspected might have something of the skill and flavor of the earlier story.
I couldn't put it down. There laid before me in a uniquely mythical and flowing language was the story of the orphaned cowherd, young Juan Caraveo, who in order to save himself from the whip of a cruel master and the taunting of a vicious ranch foreman, known as El Miedo "The Fear," flees in the night, only to be tracked and followed, first in reality and then in his imagination, by the remorseless foreman. "Fear" subsequently drives the peasant boy into the protection and employment of numerous other masters: vicious thieves and honest men, men of great courage and men of greed, lazy and hard-working men, wise and holy men, as he travels ever westward to seek the father whom he has never known, last seen in the high mountains of the distant west.
Set in the rugged Sierra Madre del Sur, intimately know to Mr. Hinton through many years of botanical exploration among its peaks and valleys, the story of Juan Caraveo is placed during the time preceding the early twentieth century agrarian reforms in Mexico, a time when the lords and peasants of remote areas were still living lives of nearly medieval simplicity. It is a simple and highly moral tale, in which young Juan, learning something from each of his many masters and inspired by the love of a beautiful peasant girl, Rosario, whose life he saves from the first and most evil of his mentors, finally vanquishes his fear and achieves a noble and well-earned manhood.
Juan Caraveo is also a first-rate work of literature. It is among that rare group of novels which, through the beauty of their language, the clarity of their conception, the range of their concerns, and their connection to all that truly matters, mark them as works that will endure. At the same time, Juan Caraveo also represents a unique blend of traditional and modern literatures, in part for its poetic narrative, which incorporates elements of Spanish sentence patterns and vocabulary, Shakespearean verse, and Homeric heroic energy, but also through its structure and vision. A rare modern example of the Spanish picaresque novel, in which, typically, an orphaned boy makes his way in life by allying himself sequentially with various masters, Juan Caraveo clearly takes its place as a descendant of the sixteenth century anonymous work Lazarillo de Tormes and can be ranked alongside a number of English novels that were written under the influence of the picaresque tradition, such as Tom Jones and Moll Flanders. At the same time, the sheer vigor with which Mr. Hinton portrays the bigger-than-life swineherds, priests, thieves, saints and muleteers who become Juan's mentors and the detail with which he portrays and lush and varied landscapes in which the story unfold, mark Juan Caraveo as an example of the magical realism employed by other contemporary Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende.
When I had finished reading I went to the phone and called James Hinton. "What did you send me this wonderful novel?" I asked. "I thought maybe you might want to publish it." And so I did.
-- Karl Barnebey, Publisher, The Fair Press
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Juan Caraveo
Juan Caraveo,James Hinton,Fair Press,0972388516,Fiction,Fiction - General,General,Literary,Fiction / General
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