Deep Rivers Reflection

Hello again, I’m back to give my thoughts on this week’s book Deep Rivers by Jose Maria Arguedas. Overall, I found the subject matter of the book to be quite interesting, but the story was a little difficult to follow at times. At certain points, it feels like very little is happening plot-wise, which made it a bit harder to pay attention to. Also, because it is a few hundred pages long, I didn’t really feel like I had the time to go back and look over parts that I did not fully understand, so I oftentimes just plowed through it and hoped that things would make sense to me in the end.

It was kind of interesting to follow Ernesto and his father around at the start of the book, and to get some insight into Peruvian culture, but it felt a bit slow. I kept wondering to myself why Ernesto’s father hates the “Old Man” so much and why he is so determined to confront him, and I’m not sure that question is ever truly answered. I was glad to find out the Old Man ties back in at the end, but there were still a lot of unanswered questions about him.

I was a bit shocked by the violence at Ernesto’s boarding school. The kids regularly get into fights, and the school’s Rector does little to prevent them. He almost seems to expect it. I also noticed a bit of a parallel between the violence at the boarding school and the violence we see outside the school (especially later on in the story).

The last thing I’d like to touch on is the stark racial/class divide that is reinforced throughout the novel, but especially in chapter 4, “The Hacienda”. On one hand, we see the wealthy landowners live in big, fancy homes, while the living quarters of their Indigenous workers are putrid (p.40). We also see the physical cruelty that the landowning class inflict upon the Indigenous people. At one point, it is stated that these landowners would “lash them across the face, kick them, and drag them off to jail personally”, if their indigenous workers asked for higher than usual pay (p.39). I liked the fact that the book tries to highlight these Indigenous concerns, since they seem to be treated practically like slaves.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll be back again next week to look at Merce Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves.

Question: What did you think of the overall pace of the book? Did you find it slow at times like I did, or were you fully engaged throughout?