The Ruins of Fordlandia still visible today are testimony enough to the folly of Ford's dream,...So too is this fine novel, which rescues Ford's folly from the most obscure pages of history and imbues it not merely with many new layers of meaning but also with its own mythology.
Horacio is one man among many who comes to Fordlandia, the Brazilian rubber plantation that Henry Ford established in 1929, in order to be rid of past mistakes in this brooding, imaginative first novel by Argentinian writer Sguiglia. In the immutable Amazon, where Horacio is employed as the chief of personnel, the protagonist's destiny begins to take shape as he and his fellow administrators battle vainly with the Brazilian jungle to establish civilization and capitalism. Horacio is an opportunist with morals, a solitary adventurer and traveler at heart who needs others in order to advance; he is above all a man on a quest for his destiny and identity. His misadventures and Sguiglia's ardent storytelling recall the works of Joseph Conrad, Alejo Carpentier and Alvaro Mutis. Challenging notions of civilization, most notably the intrusive and arrogant operations of capitalism against nature, the novel explores Fordlandia's effects on individual freedom and conformity as Horacio journeys into the jungle to recruit native workers, clashes with his misfit colleagues, battles a fungus that threatens the rubber trees and courts Caroline, the plantation's resident sociologist. In a momentous episode, Horacio suffers a near-death experience and is reborn a hero. Cleverly, Sguiglia has kept Horacio's name from the reader up until this point. As his identity is formed, his name is finally uttered by none other than Henry Ford himself. Horacio withholds vital information from the reader as easily as he withholds and manipulates information from Ford executives and jungle natives in order to serve his needs. His silences suit the narrative mood, but the mysteries of his character are so well guarded that the novel ends in deliberate opacity. Nevertheless, this is a darkly satisfying work, well served by Duncan's translation, that seamlessly mixes history with fiction. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Shades of King Lear, Heart of Darkness, and Fitzcarraldo hang over this exciting new work of fiction by Argentine Sguiglia. Horacio, who has a shadowy past and is also known as "El Argentino" and "Mi Blanco," takes a vaguely outlined job recruiting workers for Henry Ford's chimerical endeavor to create an empire in the Amazon that will supply tire-rubber for his car factories. Horacio must confront malaria, hostile indigenes, corrupt ministers, and self-interested colleagues in a despairing attempt to find personal and professional peace. The effort is doomed, the environment unforgiving, and Horacio often loses his way before a fungus destroys the multi-million-dollar investment. Meanwhile, Ford himself, first in Michigan and then on a visit to Fordlandia, begins to make unrealistic assumptions about his own power and influence, acting like a martinet as he slowly ages and loses control of his empire. Sguiglia's images of the jungle and the men and women in it are extraordinarily vivid, and this brilliant natural imagery is linked to colossal degradation, making for a taut, exciting read. Despite Duncan's fluid translation, Sguiglia is not quite up to Joseph Conrad's elegant style, yet he has fashioned a good yarn about men confronting both internal and external demons. Highly recommended.--Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
he Argentine writer Eduardo
Sguiglia's first novel, translated
deftly by Patricia J. Duncan,
revolves around a little known historical
footnote: in the late 1920's, Henry Ford
built a vast rubber plantation in the
Amazon region, ultimately colonizing
several million acres and carving out the
settlement for which this book is named
from the jungle on the river's banks.
That's a fascinating bit of information, but to call Fordlandia a historical
novel is to miss the point. Instead, it's a fable of sorts, reminiscent of the
work of Conrad or Kafka, in which, faced with the extremes of an
indifferent universe, human beings must come to terms with their own
capricious inner landscapes, the ''whim, chance and error'' that sear their
souls. New York Times Book Review
Set in 1929 on the plantation Henry Ford built in the Amazon jungle to break the British rubber monopoly, this book is full of fresh historical detail and local color grafted onto a stale plot of colonial bravado and speculative intrigue. Told by "the Argentine" in first person (except for a few jarring shifts to third-person scenes of Ford in Detroit), the narrative follows him as he sails to Fordlandia, scours the nearby jungle to find workers, falls afoul of a native, succumbs to jungle fever and returns to the ministrations of Caroline, the camp's anthropologist. Along the way, he meets characters seemingly exiled from a Graham Greene novel: a whiskey priest, a megalomaniacal administrator, goofy but wise native helpers and would-be local thugs. Eventually, nature thwarts Ford's grandiose scheme but brings a windfall to the Argentine and Caroline. The trite plot is hard to swallow, but the insights into Amazon culture and this little slice of history are food for thought.
Argentinean Sguiglia's excellent first novel is based on a historical incident: automaker Henry Ford's failed attempt, in 1929, to produce his own rubber at a plantation (and city bearing his name) craved out of Brazil's Amazon jungle. Sguiglia juxtaposes "Fordlandia's" battles against poisonous snakes and insects, rebelling workers, and a "plague" that attacks newly planted trees (as observed and endured by the narrator, the plantation's "personnel director") with brief scenes set in Detroit, where Ford—an impatient incarnation of the Western work ethic—labors to blunt the effects of the coming Depression. The ongoing "struggle between tractors and the primitive world"—a conflict that continues to resonate, and seemingly defies resolution—makes for both potent allegory and absorbing realistic drama.
