Dona Ines Versus Oblivion

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. 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. "Classic Latin American magical realism . . . [from] a remarkable voice," The Washington Post Book World