Two Novels of Venezuela

From Venezuela's Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 46-47:

Two novels describe the crux between the past and the imaginary future proposed by Betancourt: Las Lanzas Coloradas (The Red Spears) by Arturo Uslar Pietri, and Doña Barbara, by Rómulo Gallegos. The novels were published in 1931 and 1929, respectively, and both seek nothing less than to explain the country and its prospects. Naturally, both stage their dramas in the countryside.

Uslar Pietri’s Las Lanzas Coloradas tells the story of a slave plantation owned by the descendants of the original Spanish founders at the time of the Wars of Independence. Doña Barbara takes place at a cattle ranch worked by free peons rather than slaves. Gallegos’ Doña Barbara is the story of a college graduate who returns to modernize his father’s land only to find himself opposed by a vicious, uneducated woman with near-magical powers. Barbara, standing in for the country’s dark past, will stop at nothing to derail the civilizing ideals of the protagonist, whose name is Santo, Spanish for Saint. The widely popular soap opera plot in Gallego’s novel ends, predictably, with the triumph of noble civilization over barbarism.

Uslar Pietri’s novel, on the other hand, ends with the Creole family’s plantation burned and reduced to ashes, the last female descendant of the founder graphically raped and murdered by the Pardo foreman, and the white male heir half-crazed and wandering through the countryside. ...

The young Uslar Pietri was the last writer of a generation obsessed with the country’s ethnic divides, the savagery of the 19th-century wars, and what some have called the pessimistic view of Venezuelan history. Las Lanzas Coloradas is packed with impressionistic descriptions of the brutality of life for enslaved workers at the plantation, the psychological effects of human submission, and the fury mixed-race Pardos felt toward their Creole masters. Uslar Pietri’s novel also offers an alternative and radical view of the independence wars’ early years.