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160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
Ships returned from there loaded down with spices, bruised and battered, after drifting over unknown seas. People in the ports talked of little else and at times the topic fired their faces and conversations with a crazed intensity. The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination.
Every life is a well of loneliness that only grows deeper with the passing years. Being an orphan, I am more conscious than most of coming from nothing and grew up wary of the illusion of companionship which the family offers. But that night my already great sense of solitude suddenly became immense, as if the bottom of that gradually deepening well had suddenly given way and plunged me into blackness. I lay down on the ground and cried inconsolably.
An Indian once tried explaining all this to me and what I understood him to say was this: the world is made up of good and evil, of death and birth; there are old and young, men and women, winter and summer, water and earth, sky and trees. All this must always exist; if at any time one thing were missing, then everything would crumble.
"Los hombres nacen en cierto sentido, neutros, iguales, y son sus actos, las cosas que les pasan, los que los va diferenciando."No comparto este pensamiento de Saer. No se puede negar la importancia del ambiente en la formaci贸n de la personalidad, pero venimos al mundo distintos, con capacidades intelectuales y sentimentales distintas, con potencialidades e inclinaciones distintas, en absoluto neutros y moldeables como sostiene el autor.
And that morning I learned from the battered man, now scarcely breathing, that virtue cannot save us from the surrounding blackness. Even if we have the courage to find our way through one night, a little way of another longer night awaits us. In vain he had, in calmer days, striven to be good; the gaping mouth over which he danced, innocent and poised, devoured him anyway. Our lives are lived in a place of terrible indifference which recognizes neither virtue nor vice and annihilates us all without compunction, without apportioning good or evil.Unforgettably, the novel ends with the memory of a lunar eclipse, which troubles the tribe until the light slowly returns and re-establishes the tenuous existence of their world.