Product Description

Clorinda Matto de Turner was the first Peruvian novelist to command an international reputation and the first to dramatize the exploitation of indigenous Latin American people. In this tragic tale, she explores the relationship between the landed gentry and the indigenous peoples of the Andean mountain communities. While unfolding as a love story rife with secrets and dashed hopes, Torn from the Nest in fact reveals a deep and destructive class disparity, and criticizes the Catholic clergy for blatant corruption.

Lucia and Don Fernando Marin settle in the small hamlet of Killac, where they meet with violent opposition from the priest and gentry when they become advocates for the exploited local Indians. As a romance blossoms between a member of the gentry and the peasant girl that Lucia and Don Fernando have adopted, a dreadful secret prevents their marriage and brings to a climax the novel's exposure of degradation: they share the same father, a parish priest.

Torn from the Nest was first published in Peru in 1889 amidst much enthusiasm and outrage. This fresh translation--the first since 1904-- preserves one of Peru's most distinctive and compelling voices.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #708180 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
The Peruvian President praised her; the Church excommunicated her; angry mobs rampaged through her house and press. Clearly, writer, publisher, and reformer Clorinda Matto de Turner possessed a knack for igniting both enthusiasm and outrage in her 19th-century audience. The latest installment in Oxford University Press's acclaimed Library of Latin America series, her novel Torn from the Nest may excite a little less protest now than it did in 1889, but it remains a radical document in many ways: in its nascent feminism, its impassioned defense of indigenous rights, and most especially in its critique of Church corruption and advocacy of married Catholic clergy.

Translated into English for the first time since 1904, this seminal Latin American novel uses a time-tested plot--a star-crossed romance between a member of the landed gentry and a doe-eyed mestizo maiden--as a vehicle for exposing how priests, politicians, and Creole landowners exploited Indian populations. "If history is the mirror where future generations are to contemplate the image of generations past, the task of the novel is to be the photograph that captures the vices and virtues of a people," Matto writes in her preface. The key word here is photograph, and Matto demonstrates her commitment to the newfangled method of naturalism throughout the novel, meticulously reproducing the landscape and native customs of the mountain town of Killac. Its plot, language, and characterization, however, are steeped in the worst excesses of Romantic idealism, and the modern reader may find some of its more breathless passages hard to take. As a historical document, however, Torn From the Nest is invaluable for anyone seeking to understand the early days of liberalism--or literary realism--in Latin American intellectual circles.

Review
...we may see her vision of redeeming the downtrodden Indians through enlightened Christian charity and education as paternalistic, but in her day her views were a courageous attack on the colonial underpinnings of Peruvian society. -- The New York Times Book Review, Joanna O'Connell

Review

"[A] new and engaging translation."--he New York Times Book Review

Customer Reviews

A must read for those students of Peru...
I read this book while spending a month in a small Peruvian village in the Andes. A village that is far from the tourist path of Machu Pichu. A village that would mirror the mountain community of Killac, the setting for this engaging classic. Killac, is a village that depicts the neglect, backwardness and feudalism that existed in Peru at the turn of the twentieth century, and to some extent still exists today.

"Torn from the Nest" is a brilliant story of love, power, courage, oppression, virtue, incest and deceit written in 1889, and was selected as one of the first volumes in the Library of Latin America, Oxford.

The "Library of Latin America" series makes available, in English, major nineteenth century authors whose work has been neglected in the English speaking world. To be selected as one of the first works by this editorial committee was no small feat, especially when you consider the plethora of writing against which this title competed.

Clorinda Matto de Turner dared to change the demented orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church and the oppression of the indigenous Indians by the immoral wealthy gentry, including the village priest. Her anti-clerical tone was unmistakable; so much so, that the Catholic Church in Peru immediately condemned the book and considered it heretical and blatantly irreverent (that was enough to get me to read this book). This condemnation set in motion the persecution of Clorinda Matto de Turner. In the months and years to follow, because of her social, political and religious writings, she was suppressed, oppressed and finally driven from her county.

Though a century has passed, the Indians of Peru are still a oppressed people, held back by lack of education, oppression of culture and language and economic exploitation. This year, for the first time in Peruvian democratic history, a candiate from Inca descent has been elected president of Peru. For those interested in the . Highly Recommended

"If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so." (Ernest Hemingway)

Don't ruin it!
By reading the back cover of the book you will have spoiled the ending.

Enjoy.

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