DOÑA BARBARA – Romance by Romulo Gallegos

Romulo Gallegos (1884) 1969), novelist and Venezuelan politician, made university studies of Surveying and Law at the Central University of their country, but did not finish them. He railroad employee and teacher in private schools, became deputy director of the Normal School and director of the Liceo de Caracas. In his early narrator, Gallegos published Adventurers (a collection of stories). He followed this work The last Solar (a novel reissued with the title of Reinaldo Solar, history of the decline of an aristocratic through its last representative family), and Dona Barbara, a true epic that takes place the Venezuelan plains.

Doña Barbara is a realist novel, where the characters in search of themselves, not through inner reflection, but in contact and in the confrontation with the outside world: primitive wanting, needing and struggling to get to know each other through the wild world and implacable around them. The novel, in 1929, is a majestic fresco de los llanos (the great plain of the state Apure crossed the Arauca River), and tells the clash between progress and barbarism, between culture, represented symbolically by Santos Luzardo and brujeria from Dona Barbara, but more generally, is an analysis of the Venezuelan society of the nineteenth century is characterized by despotism, landlordism, corruption, lack of freedom. The exciting story has been brought to the screen in 1943. More than a novel of manners, or epic, Doña Barbara is a native epic, sometimes animated by a beautiful lyrical force, where everything changes and moves in a fascinating space, plains Venezuela, in an epic from the breast, tenacious and courageous men and women with complex emotions. https://www.amazon.it/Dona-Barbara-Romulo-Gallegos/dp/0226279200