Building your Library: Amalia
“On the night of the 4th of May, 1840, at half-past ten o’clock, a party of six men might be seen crossing the inner courtyard of a small house in the Calle de Belgrano, in the city of Buenos Ayres.” Amalia by José Mármol
Is there any more enticing first line to a novel than a midnight escape?
Set in the oppressive atmosphere of Rosas’s Buenos Aires, Amalia follows a cast of three captivating figures. It opens in the middle of the night as one of the novel’s heroes, Eduardo Belgrano is fleeing Argentina. Little does he know he is being lured to certain death at the hands of a death squad known as the Mazorca. Eduardo, badly wounded but fighting valiantly, serves as the pretext for the entrance of the novel’s captivating and ambiguous hero Daniel Bello, a character for whom who Eduardo (brash and brave) is the foil. Daniel leaves his friend in the care of the titular character, his beautiful, intelligent, and graceful widowed cousin Amalia. As Amalia nurses Eduardo back to health the two fall in love while Daniel sets out to save their lives and the life of his fiancé Florencia, by sending them into exile.
We quickly learn that while Daniel has saved the openly Unitarist Belgrano, he is also deeply entangled with Rosas, making him an enigmatic character, a double-agent in the narrative who employs his intelligence rather than strength and bravado to try to survive in Rosas’s Buenos Aires.
"Daniel immediately walked over to the table as Amalia placed the lamp on it, and taking his pretty cousin’s little lily-white hands in his, said to her, ‘Amalia, on the few occasions when we see each other, I have always spoken of a young man to whom I am bound by ties of the most intimate and fraternal friendship; that young man, Eduardo, is the person whom you have just received in your house, the one who is lying here gravely wounded.”
Amalia is populated with attractively aristocratic heroes and heroines. Charismatic characters one immediately begins rooting for even if the novel is guilty of heavy handedness. it is an easy and quick read in spite of being as long as any Victorian novel. For those of you looking to take a Spanish language adventure, to add some classic but lesser known works to your shelf, the Library of Latin America series has released an affordable translation of the Argentine and Latin American classic Amalia by José Mármol, though, as if to remind us of the selective translation of Latin American literature this translation is only available in hardcover and kindle editions. While it would be particularly rewarding to feel its substantial weight in the form of an accessibly priced paperback, for now a kindle edition will have to do, and is well worth the ten dollars. As readers our imaginations are well-primed to make up for the deficiencies of the digital. I’m already imagining my ideal copy.
Belonging to the genre of Latin American literature known as the Foundational Romances (Romances Fundacionales), Amalia is at once a romance, an adventure, an early example of that iconic Latin American genre the dictator novel, and a political polemic. Written in exile by criollo politician and novelist José Mármol, Amalia is a novel at once embodying the history of Latin America and illustrating the challenges of formal decolonization. It is set in Marmol’s own time and dramatizes Argentina’s tumultuous years under Juan Manuel de Rosas, a politically polarizing figure who, nevertheless, united much of what we now recognize as the nation of Argentina. But Amalia isn’t just an example of Latin American literature, it is a captivating work that entertains through suspense (as illustrated in the above lines). As a life long lover of Victorian Literature part of what immediately drew me into the novel was the way it combined the familiarity of Victorian novels with the landscape of Westerns.
So what do you say? Are you ready to take a trip to nineteenth-century Buenos Aires with me? As usual, I’ll do at least two more posts to provide supplementary material to help explain some details worth knowing as you read, but really, regardless of your interest, the novel is a captivating and suspenseful novel. Just be careful, if you don't read Spanish, to be sure to get the English translation when you buy the kindle edition. Amazon indicates there is a paperback, but that text is a Spanish Edition, so I recommend getting the kindle version to avoid any errors.