Firstly, let me admit to initially having trouble understanding Tomás Rivera's '...Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra'. While the vocabulary is much less advanced than the complicated vernacular of Martí, the structure is considerably less
intuitive. In order to enhance my experience of the text, I watched a film of a 1994 English-language stage production of the book. It is titled 'And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him', and was put on by America Playhouse Theatrical Films. I'm not sure if this is cheating or not, but I really do feel like it enhanced my understanding and enriched my experience of this text.
As I mentioned before, and many of my fellow blogging classmates have noticed, the structure of the book is very unorthodox. I cannot quite call it an anthology or collection of shorts, but is not a 'novel' per say either. I was at first, and still am somewhat, confused by this arrangement, but have been attempting to figure out the reason to write it as such. The best explanation that I can come up with is that the structure-twelve stories layered into thirteen shorter anecdotes-is reflective of Latin American understanding regarding time and space. In comparison to current and historically linear North American conceptions, many Latin American legends etc. are constructed with more fluid and less chronological time structures. For example, the Popol Vuh, commonly refered to as the Mayan 'Bible' or sacred religious text, in written in such as way as time appears more circular than in the Christian Bible, for example. Given this historical context, I can understand why, to Rivera, this book would be structured in a way consistent with the cultural milieu he lived in, and to us it may seem foreign or unintuitive.
2 comments:
Hi!
I found it really interesting that you watched the movie (more like im thinking why didn't I think of this? haha). Did you find that the movie portraied what you would have expected by reading some of the book? I'd be very curious to see what that would be like. Also, abotu the non-linear structure of the book: I feel like a lot of the disorientation that we as readers feel by reading a book of this form, this is much like the mexican boy felt when living his own life outside of his home. By having us feel this way we can sympathize with what we're reading in a much more understanding manner: we are just as lost as the young boy.
I've actually heard of this movie a long time ago! " And The Earth Did Not Swallow HIm" I've heard very great reviews about this film. I wonder how true the film stayed to the book. I have not finished the novel yet and i think that the 12 short stories would somehow cross paths in the end.
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