Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> World Literature - Mexico

From reviews of the Spanish edition:

Like waves ebbing and flowing, love surges and subsides among four friends who share a vacation at the house on the beach. As they navigate the seas of love and friendship, jealousy and unfaithfulness, Elena, Marta, Eduardo, and Rafael are swept up in the opposing currents that flow between security and personal freedom, marriage and sexual liberation, family and work, provincial and city life, and traditional and unconventional gender roles.

This deceptively simple novel, published in Mexico in 1966 as La casa en la playa and here translated into English for the first...

This tale of a repressive priest and his small Mexican village during the eighteen months preceding the Revolution of 1910 is a great novel, one that exposes the struggle between human desire and paralyzing fear--fear of humanity, fear of nature, fear of the wrath of God. Agustin Yanez probes the actions of people caught in life's currents, enthralling his readers with mounting dramatic tension as he shows that no power can forge saints from the human masses, that any attempt to do so, in fact, often has exactly the opposite result.

Yanez brings to his work a deep understanding of...

What was it that flew over with such a terrifying roar? Was it, as many said, the devil, or was it that thing a few had heard of, a flying machine? And those electric lights at Jacob Gallo's farm, were they witchcraft or were they science?

The theme of this harshly powerful novel is the impact of modern technology and ideas on a few isolated, tradition-bound hamlets in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The old ways are represented by Epifanio Trujillo, the cacique of the region, now ailing and losing his grip on things; by ancient Madre Matiana, the region's midwife,...