Dona Ines Vs. Oblivion
Subtitle: A Novel (Pegasus Prize for Literature)
Contributors: Gregory Rabassa (Translator)
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: October 1999
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 243
ISBN-13: 9780807124765
Subjects: Historical fiction; Modern fiction; Latin American Novel And Short Story; Fiction - General; Fiction; Literary; Historical - General
First sentence: My life has been a passage through slow mornings, long days that time ran through sluggishly as I supervised the work of the slave women, watching them sweep the flagstones in the courtyard, polish the floor tiles and the glazed wall mosaics I'd had brought from Andalusia, gather the fallen leaves from the lemon tree, and water the guava tree in the yard; embroidering a point or two on a mantle or taking a turn through the kitchen to taste the soup and see that everything was as it should be before Alejandro's arrival and asking him during lunch what had been discussed at the council, what the price for cacao was and whether the ship carrying it had sunk.
Description: "Matriarch of a wealthy planter family in the eighteenth-century village of Caracas, Dona Ines fights for control of a coastal-province plantation that her late husband has bequeathed to his illegitimate son by a black slave. She dies in 1780 but continues her exposition, searching to prove her rights while observing the political upheavals, natural disasters, bloodshed, and changing racial, social, and cultural strictures visited on her own and other Venezuelan families in the next two hundred years.

She watches, finally with resignation, as Caracas becomes an unrecognizable modern metropolis and her descendants acquiesce to compromise over the disputed property."--BOOK JACKET. "Ultimately a journal of the tragic clash between classes, of the interface between humanity and geography, Dona Ines vs. Oblivion depicts the maturation of Venezuela more vividly than any work of nonfiction."--BOOK JACKET.