Recommendations
Books Like Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers)
Books for readers who loved Arguedas's Andean coming-of-age masterpiece
José María Arguedas's 1958 Los ríos profundos follows Ernesto suspended between the Quechua world of his indigenous childhood and the Spanish colonial world of his provincial school, in prose that attempts to write in Spanish what is experienced in Quechua. These eight books share its territory: the novel of indigenous or minority experience in a colonial or post-colonial world, the coming-of-age novel in a world of cultural fracture, and fiction where the landscape itself carries meaning in ways that cannot be translated.
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Buy on AmazonPedro Páramo
by Juan Rulfo
The other great mid-century Latin American novel of a landscape inhabited by the dead — where Arguedas's Andes carry the Quechua world, Rulfo's Jalisco carries the Mexican dead; both are novels where the land is conscious.
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Buy on AmazonThings Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
An Igbo community's encounter with colonialism narrated from inside the Igbo world — the same project as Arguedas's Andean novel: making the experience of cultural fracture legible from the colonized perspective.
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Buy on AmazonOne Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
The other great Latin American novel of a world that cannot be translated into European rational terms — the Buendía family's world is as untranslatable as Arguedas's Quechua, and as insistently itself.
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Buy on AmazonSo Long a Letter
by Mariama Bâ
A Senegalese woman writing to her friend about a life lived in two cultural worlds — the same sense of a person suspended between two incompatible systems of meaning as Arguedas's Ernesto.
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Buy on AmazonThe Burning Plain
by Juan Rulfo
The companion collection to Pedro Páramo — Rulfo's stories share Arguedas's quality of land as a moral presence and violence as a matter-of-fact condition rather than a dramatic event.
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Buy on AmazonThe Stone Face
by William Gardner Smith
An African American in Paris in the 1950s — suspended between two worlds, belonging entirely to neither; the experience of cultural fracture that Arguedas renders in Andean terms.
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Buy on AmazonCeremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
A Laguna Pueblo novel in which the land, the ceremonial tradition, and the experience of WWII form an incompatible triple — the North American Andean novel, where indigenous landscape and colonial history create the same fracture.
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Buy on AmazonAt the Bottom of the River
by Jamaica Kincaid
Kincaid's first collection of lyrical prose-poems set in Antigua — the same attempt as Arguedas to write the experience of another world in prose that bends English toward that world's perceptions.
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