Los ríos profundos Reading Order

Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers, 1958) by José María Arguedas is the most important Andean novel of the twentieth century and one of the most unusual in Latin American literature: a coming-of-age novel set in an Andean provincial school in which the adolescent Ernesto is suspended between the Quechua world of his indigenous childhood and the Spanish colonial world of his schooling, and the novel itself is suspended between two languages, two cosmogonies, and two ways of being in the world. Arguedas was himself raised in Quechua communities as a child of white parents, and he described Deep Rivers as an attempt to write in Spanish what he experienced in Quechua — an impossible project that the novel approximates by its quality of prose, its musicality, and its way of describing the natural world in terms borrowed from Quechua perception. The novel's title comes from a huayno (Andean song): 'Kaypacha Sonqoniqim / Phiñasqan Llapallan' — 'The rivers deep within the earth / Are angered by all things.' The rivers in the novel — the Apurímac, the Pachachaka — are not just physical rivers but presences, voices, the indwelling spirit of the Andean landscape. Arguedas was a major ethnomusicologist and folklorist as well as a novelist; the Quechua world he depicts in Deep Rivers is not romanticized but observed with anthropological precision and felt with personal grief. He killed himself in 1969 after completing El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below), his last and most formally experimental novel.