The Oligarch

Résumé du livre

1936: Gustav Hoffman flees the emerging holocaust. He arrives in German Friendly Guatemala and establishes himself as a coffee planter among dispossed Mayans. Within two years, Gustav joins the oligarch Zelaya family by marrying Lela, the eldest daughter. But his politics and Lela's gritty support soon alienate the oligarch, Don Fernando Zelaya Brandt. The subsequent family crisis mirrors the social crisis in the country. Civil war erupts in 1960 and Don Fernando's family splits along the fault lines of the social chasm. The story picks up in 1974: "The younger man lay on a thick mat of brown needles. His fist supported his chin as he studied the cluster of wooden houses below. One smoldered, its walls collapsed into a teepee of charcoaled boards suspended in a dune of white ashes and rimmed by blackened thatch. Thin lanyards of smoke arose like soul tracks until fading into glare at the level of the two men."