cover image Sangama: A Story of the Amazon Jungle

Sangama: A Story of the Amazon Jungle

Arturo D. Hernández, trans. from the Spanish by Raymond A. Enstam. Quaestor, $14.95 trade paper (358p) ISBN 978-0-9786914-0-0

Enstam’s translation of Hernández’s best-known novel, a curricular staple for Peruvian schoolchildren, is as vibrant and wild as the jungle it eulogizes. The novel relates the tale of Abel Barcas, a young man seeking work in the booming rubber industry of turn-of-the-century Santa Inés, a village on a tributary of the Amazon River called the Ucayali. Latex-rich shiringa trees have made the jungle a gold mine for some, such as the corrupt governor Portunduaga, and a snake pit for others, including local populations ruined by the slave trade and forced labor. Initially, Barcas gets entangled in a series of slapstick misadventures, several undertaken with the book’s titular jungle savant, creating an episodic feel until a mission to recover a missing villager galvanizes the action. A love story between Barcas and Sangama’s daughter, Chuya, adds intrigue to what is otherwise an extended ode to an ecosystem that’s been vanishing since the book’s first printing in 1942. Readers hoping for subtle dialogue and character depth will be disappointed; melodrama seems to be the order of the day, but the author’s familiarity with the region establishes the Amazon’s “green prison”—teeming with alligator-swallowing anacondas, malevolent strangler figs, and man-eating ants—as one of the book’s most compelling characters, second only to the “capricious monster” of the Ucalayi itself. [em](BookLife) [/em]