Eternity Is Procreation

By R. Z. Sheppard

NINA HUANCA

by FAUSTINO GONZALEZ-ALLER Translated by MARGARET SAVERS PEDEN 243 pages. Viking. $10.

There is a standing joke among journalists that the world will do anything for Latin America except read about it. The general curiosity seems to end with fourth-grade geography and the fact that Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable body of water on earth. Yet this vast land mass, drooping from North America like some ripe, unplucked fruit, has produced some of this century's major poets and novelists: Peru's Cesar Vallejo, Chile's Pablo Neruda, Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia.

Faustino Gonzalez-Aller is a Spaniard, a journalist and screenwriter who has returned to his native 4and after years of living and working in Central America and New York City. Like so many of today's serious novels, his Nina Huanca seems to have been shaped by the experiences of migration and cultural isolation. Modern Hispanic novelists have had the good fortune to share many of the same themes with their 19th century Russian counterparts--problems of underdevelopment, social and political injustice, gaping class divisions and a religious sense of the land and peasantry. Nina Huanca is yet another powerful example of what happens when a talented writer handles such ageless material with the spontaneous techniques of 20th century fiction.

Much of the novel is set in a fictitious Central American republic, a territory of the mind that has lately received many tourists. Joan Didion exercised her talents there in A Book of Common Prayer. Garcia 3's The Autumn of the Patriarch also took place in such a Central American dreamscape. Nina Huanca strikes similar social and political chords, but Gonzalez-Aller also seeks the high notes of myth and the mysteries of human motives.

Colonel Felix Arruza is a grotesque banana republic Zeus who is fond of procreating with comely peasant girls while his wife takes on the palace guard. Among Arruza's numerous offspring is Miguel Angel Matalax Yanama, a 28-year-old wanderer who has studied law at Harvard and social science in Germany. He has lost an eye as a U.N. observer in the Gaza strip and he has been a teacher and a Red Cross worker in Biafra. But Matalax has eaten the bitter bread of illegitimacy and plans to over throw his dictator-father.

As in the Greek myth of the castration of Uranus, the rebellious son has the help of his mother. Nina Huanca, raped by Colonel Arruza when she was 17, is a figure of legendary proportions.

As the captain of her own freighter, she lives outside history -- obeying only the tides, stars, wind, and her own biological urges. She is also rich, and her mon ey supports Matalax's revolutionary plot, a wild, complex scheme that includes recruiting look-alikes to replace Colonel Arruza & Co.

Author Gonzalez-Aller uses flash backs, lyricism, internal monologues and bitter wit to project his vision of cor ruption, revolution and revenge. Lusts, loyalties and betrayals are as entwined as jungle vines. Ideals and dreams are trampled, only to emerge again. History has no beginning, middle and end, only a cycle of birth and death. To Gonzalez-Aller, "Eternity is procreation."

Matalax himself fathers only sterile hatreds and a longing for a private immortality that the world can never deliver. Yet without such longing he would lack the painful humanity that makes him a poignant character. There is throughout Nina Huanca an echo of Spanish Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno's "tragic sense of life," recaptured and amplified in just the right tones of modern inconsolability.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.