The Underdogs

By -
Los de abajo -- The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela

It's my very first official Reading Around the World title, and I chose to go next door to Mexico. The Underdogs (literally, those from underneath) is a short novel about the Mexican Revolution written in 1915; Azuela served as a doctor during the fighting.  I've got the Norton Critical Edition (and if you're going to read it, you should too, unless you know a lot more about the Mexican Revolution than I do), and the translator says not only that it's the best novel about the revolution, but in his opinion "may actually be the best Mexican novel ever."

Demetrio Macías is a tough peasant rancher in the sierra.  When he offends some local official, the Federales burn his home and he becomes the leader of a ratty bunch of rebels.  They move around, doing some fighting and some looting, and when Demetrio is injured, they spend a lot of time in one village.  A literate journalist, Luis Cervantes, joins them; he used to make a living writing articles criticizing the bandidos, but now wants to join the glorious cause.  He is quieter and more intelligent than the others (who kind of despise him and call him curro), and he helps out with his superior medical and political knowledge, but he also kind of preys on them, giving them drinking money in exchange for the smaller, more portable valuables they loot.  Camila, a sweet, plain peasant girl, has a crush on him but he deceives her into Demetrio's arms.   In the end, most of Demetrio's followers get killed (not Luis, who goes off to medical school in the US with his gains), and Macías goes home, unsatisfied and hopeless, before one last battle.

Azuela is not portraying these guys as romantic heroes fighting the oppressor.  He shows them, without a smidgen of sentiment, as rough, angry, and none too sure about where they're going or what they're doing.  Mostly they want to loot, dominate, and wreck, and they're perfectly willing to kill over nothing much (though they brag about it a lot more than they do it).  They hang around small villages, forcing their fellow peasants to feed and house them, and then go looking for somebody to fight.  They hope to get into power after the Federales are defeated, and then they plan to act just like their oppressors did.  I'm not sure Macías and his guys are the underdogs as much as the rest of the peasants of Mexico are -- they pay the same price regardless of who is in power.

It's not exactly the sort of novel you enjoy while curled up under a blanket -- it's mostly a rough and ugly picture of a rough and ugly time -- but it's an important one in Mexican literature that seems to offer an honest portrayal.



Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more