August
Between the countryside, literary guerrillas, and an ecological rereading: the keys to Zurzulita, the peak novel of Chilean criollismo.
Catalina Araya, a journalist for Culto, from the newspaper La Tercera, writes a sharp piece about the book Zurzulita. Critical Edition by Mariano Latorre. She writes in her headline:
«A story that marked the course of criollismo on our continent, despite emerging in the heat of a generational shift in Chilean literature, which kept it in a true literary ring with the critic Alone. Here are some insights into its importance and the reasons to revisit it after 100 years.
“The dualism that animates the pages of Doña Bárbara and it has been persisting since the Facundo, from Sarmiento, it re-emerges in the daring scenes of Zurzulita. The European and the Indigenous, the Creole, crouching and impenetrable, and the renovator, which carries the support of a transporting culture to American soils. Mateo Elorduy has just succumbed, overcome by his surroundings, defeated in his poetic illusions by the local bosses and cunning inhabitants of the coastal mountain ranges of Chile.
Santiago, October 1948. With these words, the writer and literary critic Ricardo A. Latcham used to describe Zurzulita (1920), the Mariano Latorre's first novel, professor, former director of the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile, and an author native to Cobquecura, celebrated as the father of Chilean criollismo. Set in the village of Huerta de Maule, it tells the story of the young Elorduy who, after his father's death, decides to leave his city life behind to start from scratch on a farm he inherited thanks to a debt his father was owed. This, despite being aware that he lacks the vital strength to face the adversities of country life.