Un retrato en la geografía / A Portrait in the Landscape
Novel , 1962
Drácena
Pages: 366
What happens when a dictator dies? A whirlwind of competing interests is unleashed, each seeking to fill the power vacuum. This unstable scenario provides the backdrop for A Portrait in the Landscape, set in a society that has suddenly discovered its newfound wealth through oil exploitation.
Above all, A Portrait in the Landscape is a portrait — almost a daguerreotype — of any political transition and its characteristic players: on one side, those driven by greed and the thirst for power; on the other, those fighting for the proclamation and enforcement of public freedoms long suppressed by the fallen regime. Inevitably, these two forces will clash.
Originally conceived as the first volume in the trilogy The Labyrinth of Fortune, the project was later condensed by Arturo Úslar Pietri into a diptych with the publication of Masquerade Season, a novel that revisits Venezuelan society a decade later.