content: Written 50 years ago, this uniquely-styled novel, with multi-page single paragraph passages apparently used to render community scenes in a unified format seems to me to be a kind of impressionist painting in words, sliding fluidly between a smallish back country city on the edge of the desert and an island village in the upper reaches of the Amazon, with a motley population of mostly poor but proud peasants and indians, some living by smuggling contraband, others by the central elaborate [...] house where an old harp player leads a combo of local musicians. The hopes and fears, successes and failures, of the protagonists translate neither to heroes nor villains, and sad or happy events follow each other in timeless progression. The respected writer produced subsequent superior works, but this difficult effort still deserves patronage.