{"product_id":"the-pond-la-charca-9781558760929","title":"The Pond (La Charca)","description":"Before the turn of the century, while the rich in Madrid, Paris and Rome capped their sumptuous dinners with sips of Puerto Rico's exquisite black caf , the anemic men, women and children who harvested the precious crop lived in squalid huts and rarely saw a scrap of meat. Brutalized by grinding poverty, theirs was the harsh world of Manuel Zeno-Gandia's La Charca, published in 1894 and widely acknowledged as the first major novel to emerge from Puerto Rico. In the colloquial Spanish of Puerto Rico's hill-country, una charca is a stagnant pond, a body of brackish water. Puerto Rico's Spanish colonial society, says Zeno-Gandia, was an immense charca of human beings, oppressed by poverty, ignorance and disease. His bitter melodrama offers stark contrasts: the beautiful Puerto Rican countryside, a veritable Garden of Eden; yet within that \"regal panorama,\" starved, diseased human beings clung desperately to life.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Markus Wiener Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50556934652178,"sku":"9781558760929","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_a62b60a3-5628-49c6-b109-3f3c2664add6.jpg?v=1731767301","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-pond-la-charca-9781558760929","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}