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by Eustasio Rivera (Author), Flor Maria Rodriguez-Arenas (Editor)
Jos Eustasio Rivera lived in an era of major transformations that caused hesitation in the social and cultural parameters of everyday life. As an intellectual he possessed a reflexive attitude about the national problems and the political sectarianism. He also felt a great love for the nation as a result from seeing how the national territory was being disintegrated for diverse causes. Contradicted officially on the social accusations he had done as a member of the National Congress, he resorted to the novel to create conscience in the readers and thus to mobilize them to perform a social change. He was a committed writer and an authentic creator and literary innovator that took an open position of refusal against the negligence of the governments that didn't do anything about the abuses, the chaos and the destruction caused by the transnationals, the large capitals and the oligarchies. For that reason, in his fictional world the production of the literary referent deals with the dialectic of horror suffered by Arturo Cova and the rural hinterland population trapped by the atrocities denounced in the fictional realm. La voragine is a complex work that possesses a high degree of flexibility and a modern use of structural levels and techniques that reveal the formal transformations with which Rivera left aside mechanical writing and traditional constructions of narrative worlds. It also shows the writer's relationship with his readers, and his careful attention to their horizons of expectations. For all the reasons, it has been affirmed that this novel is "a work that resists the usual pigeonholing of realism, naturalism or telluric criollismo by which it is usually identified in the traditional critical discourse" (Schulman), also that it "is the most structurally and technically advanced novel of the period" (Goic), and that it is "a work of art that, within the literature written in Spanish, does not have parallel" (Guti rrez Girardot).
