Henry Bordeaux once exclaimed: “Here I am in Rome again after seventeen years!” Then he recalls his youth: O those morning walks in the perfumed gardens on the Pincian! (Rodriguez, the South American novelist, says in Idolos Rotos: “I can not forget the tardy twilights on the Pincian!”) Bordeaux remarks as an aside, that even humble people, in Rome, have the gift of eloquence.
Italy! Enchanting land, which still holds the heart of the world, and all its youth!
A soundly made novel that deserves consideration from thinkers, is Idolos Rotos (Broken Idols), by Manuel Diaz Rodriguez, published long ago in Venezuela. It is powerful in sense of sociological, economical, and political forces. It is a possessive reproduction of locality. I do not know of any other one book in which an idle reader can learn to understand so well, the differing values, the changing present condition of a great race, suddenly thrust into new material backgrounds, undergoing the too rapid physiological pressure of an untried climate. The book has mental detachment. It has balance of ideas. It has calm, unprejudiced observation. It is brilliant, subtle, and penetrating. And it has fine sincerity. The writer carries forward fearlessly the logic of a visioned idea. The prose is always good and sometimes great.
Few have been able to look upon the civilizations that grew up with mushroom swiftness in the new lands of the West, the Americas, with clearer eyes. We meet here the mind of South American youth. And the book has stable novel architecture.
“Victimas de un sistema.... Victims of an educational system which is wholly speed and with which they pretend to ripen brains and polish intelligence, just as heavy machinery is moved about by electricity or steam ... harmonious development is impossible,” writes Rodriguez.
It is a story of a wealthy young South American, educated for years in Europe, who comes home and tries to take up again the life he knew in childhood.
Of April in Caracas, he is enthusiastic: “It is a spectacle worthy of admiration, when the acacias flower, and trees wear crowns of purple and robes of flame!”
Sometimes Rodriguez warns against the dangers of democracies in words which remind us of León Daudet or De Tocqueville. There is no national soul, he says. And nothing is done to develop it. In Venezuela there are three ethnic unities which are hostile to any united progress.
He has written glowingly of the days of tropic summer. Again I translate from memory: “The cicadas sang. From every tree, every bush, rang their shrill announcement of summer. Near and far, every spot of green, every twig, leaf, was a strident trill, inescapable, like the high, glorious notes of crystal chords vibrating with frenzy until they snap. From the scanty vegetation on the edge of gorges, which, toward the north, divide capriciously the city ... swelled monotonous, sharp song.... From all points of the compass it came. And in Caracas, from every patio, surged the deafening song of the penetrating choir.”
Albert, idle in his studio, thought it was the tortured cry of a land sick with fever, praying the implacable blue for rain. The land was burned. This heat of fever quivered everywhere like a thirst. The fever leaped with violent color-cry to top boughs of the búcares. It leaped in blinding bloom to tall tolu-trees, to the acacias, which were breaking with blossoms. Nowhere in the city nor the forests could one see trees that were not covered with flowers, purple, red, and the hues of flame. From his window he confronted tolu-trees completely enveloped like armor in purple petals.