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Reading this for August 2021 BOTM Reading 1001. This books significance is that it was written for Andean people of Peru and tho it is in Spanish, the author thought and expressed himself as Quechua. So far, it is the story of a young lad's experience expressed in terms of sensual and spiritual. The book is semi autobiographical. The main character is a boy with a double origin. "A child with roots in two hostile worlds." quote by Mario Vargas Llosa. He was brought up by Indians but yet he is white and therefore does not fit in that world or in the world of the Indian. Ernesto doesn't feel like he belongs anywhere. He lives in his memories and in his communion with nature. He also has a love of music. In the last chapter there is this quote about Ernesto as he walks around the schoolyard where he has been a resident and soon will be leaving; "more attentive to memories than to external things." This is also a story of Ernesto's coming of age. He is going from a reality of innocence to one where he is aware of evil.

The title Deep Rivers refers to nature but also to life to the depth, the hidden, the treacherous.
Nature Quotes:
"feel the rest of their lives the brush of its comforting warmth on their hearts, protecting them from hatred and melancholy." (reference to the insect Zumbayllu.
"The Abancay lemon, large, thick-skinned, edible within and easy to peel, contains a juice which, when mixed with brown sugar, makes the most deliciou and potent food in the world. It is a burning and sweet. It instill happiness. It instills happiness. It is as if one were drinking sunlight."
"sunshine often appears between scattered showers" and "deeply moved by the sun and the dark clouds that cast down their rain.".

Ernesto has his own religion. He incorporates his Indian upbringing with his Christian. The Rector of the boarding school is the incarnation of human duplicity and the accomplice of injustice." (LLosa). Also in reference to social status, the reference of the hacienda owners as a form of God to his subjects. To quote one of the boys Antero. "I used to weep,. Who wouldn't but the Indians must be kept down. You can't understand because you're not a landowner." Two episodes in the book include the insurrection of the market women and the ravages of the plague.

The book is considered by the translator as one that is hard for us readers to connect because while it was written in Spanish but author wrote it for the people who speak Quechua. He wanted to write it in quechua and it contains Quechua. I found it beautiful writing of nature and did not find it hard to read. ( )

My edition of this book (which has the same ISBN as the edition I chose, but looks different and comes in at just under 250 pages) took me over 2 weeks to read. Over 2 weeks for fewer than 250 pages. Clearly, I did not love it.

From everything I have read (the intro, the afterword by Llosa, and the goodreads description), this novel is a semi-autobiographical account of Arguedas' childhood. Brought up by Indians, when he re-entered Latino society, he found he did not fit in. But he didn't fit into Indian culture either, being Latino and not native.

I know I have to be missing some (read: many, or maybe all?) cultural clues in this book. I struggled to know who was Indian and who was not—at the seminary school, the boys have a huge hierarchy (very Lord of the Flies-esque, another book I did not love). I could not understand how this hierarchy was determined. Wealth? Looks? Smarts? Plain old popularity? To me, this book was about a boy who had been brought up on the road, traveling with his father from town to town and not getting to stay anywhere for as long as he would like. And his father then leaves him at this seminary. And yes, he does not fit in, but that is because he has never needed to or had the opportunity to live amongst the same people for long, and his father does not visit nor write. He is all alone, trying to make friends (and he does, though it is hard and he is an outcast). He simple does not know how to function in a stable society.

The descriptions of the natural world--birds, bugs, landscape--were my favorite parts. I googled many of the trees and birds to see what they really look like. It made me laugh when one of the birds turned out to be a South American mockingbird. And yes, the description sounded like one!

Interestingly, the 1001 books summary sees this book more how I read it. The clueless non-Latin-American interpretation, perhaps.

Also, much of the language in this book reminded me of Calvino's Invisible Cities (which I did enjoy). I read both in translation, which strikes me as--odd. Something about the cadence of the writing. ( )

What a lovely book this is. I thoroughly enjoyed Jose Maria Arguedas' "Deep Rivers" and marveled at the ability of translator Frances Horning Barraclough to create a rhythm that seemed really unique in a book that was considered tough to translate. Argeudas wrote in Spanish, but used the sentence constructions of Quecha, a language used in the Peruvian Andes.

The story centers on Ernesto, a white boy who was banished to the kitchens by his stepmother, so he lived among Peruvian Indians, learning not only Quecha but their manner of relating to the landscape so closely. (This was in fact Arguedas' own upbringing.) Ernesto is left at a boarding school in Abancay, where life proceeds as it might in a small Peruvian town.

Although there seems to be a sort of universality to stories about boys' boarding schools, no matter what the culture, this story was told in such a remarkable and interesting way. It felt like a primer on Peru's culture without feeling dry... just a great story wrapped up in a fascinating setting. ( )

This was a haunting and at times painful book to read. It is the story of Ernesto, a white Peruvian boy who was relegated to the kitchen by the relatives he was sent to live with and thus was raised by the Indian servants and came to speak their language, Quechua, and love their culture, especially their relationship to the natural world. When he got a little older, his father, a not-so-successful itinerant lawyer, took him with him as he traveled around the Andes seeking work.

As the story opens, the father is taking his son to see his estranged brother, known as the Old Man, in the ancient city of Cuzco. The Spanish colonial walls built on top of the remains of Inca stone buildings set the symbolic stage for the rest of the book, for Ernesto is caught between the two cultures. Later, father and son go to the town of Abancay, where the father hopes to stay but ultimately leaves his son at a Catholic boarding school. It is there that most of the novel takes place.

Although the usual pranks and even some terrible cruelties take place at the school -- most horribly the opaquely described repeated rapes of a mentally unstable woman called "the Idiot" -- most of Ernesto's time there is spent inside his own unhappy and lonely head. The most moving and lyrical parts describe his connection to nature, not just animals and plants but the mountains and rocks and rivers, all of which in Quechua culture have much greater significance than in white culture, and are often even personified. Aruguedas, whose early life was similar to Ernesto's, frequently uses Quechua words and Quechua songs to illustrate Ernesto's deep love of the culture and its conflict with the powers that be. Ernesto is also drawn to the myths and spirits and music of the Indian culture and endows a top he receives as a gift with the powers of communication.

I found it a little difficult to keep track of who the various schoolboys were, but I think this was intentional, as they are really more symbols of different aspects of white and mestizo upbringings than fully developed characters. Although there is not much of a plot, a couple of things of significance happen, including an uprising by local woman because the distribution of salt has been halted; feeling himself connected more to these women than to the society inside his school, Ernesto runs after them, drawing the ire of the powerful but condescending priest, the Rector, who runs the school. (Later, however, in the wake of another trouble that strikes the area, the Rector will try to protect Ernesto.) Following the uprising, the troops come to town, and that gives Arguedas the opportunity to further contrast people from the coastal regions with those from the highlands, and to further show the conflicts between the descendants of the colonialists and the indigenous populations.

Mostly, as I said, this book is about Ernesto, and the tragedy of his alienation from both worlds which leads to his living so much in his own dreams and odd ideas.

"I wanted to see Salvinia, Alcira, and Antero. And then to become a falcon and soar over the towns where I had once been happy; to descend to the levels of the rooftops, following the streams that bring water to the settlements, hovering for a moment over the familiar trees and stones that mark the boundary of the tilled fields and, later, calling down from the depths of the sky." p. 161

Because Ernesto is the center of the book, and because he is so unhappy and feels so out of place, this was in places a difficult book to read. The ending of the book is ambiguous, and not a little shocking.

Arguedas, who was also raised by Indian servants in a home in which his white stepmother despised him, became an ethnologist and ultimately killed himself. My edition had an interesting afterword by fellow Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa.