Comparable to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Lisa St. Aubin de Terán's short novel Keepers of the House will appeal to those who enjoy South American literature, with the additional benefit that nothing can have been lost in translation: St. Aubin de Terán is an Englishwoman who married a Venezuelan man and lived in the country for seven years in the Seventies. Keepers of the House is a strongly-autobiographical fictionalization of her situation there.

We follow Lydia, a young Englishwoman who marries a Venezuelan landowner and settles into his estate in the Andes. Her situation is the framework for a series of six episodic chapters (essentially short stories) which detail the fortunes of some the generations of the noble Beltrán family. Each of these family stories are told to Lydia by a lifelong family servant named Benito Mendoza (the book is dedicated to a man of the same name) and there is a slightly weak attempt to stitch these stories together to portray a greater literary arc, that of "the last of the families of the first conquistadores [who] were in their decline" (pg. 65), and, by extension, the country of Venezuela itself.

However, the comparison to Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, while useful as shorthand for a review, also betrays some of the book's faults. It is hard to differentiate St. Aubin de Terán's Venezuela from Márquez's Colombia, and I know as much about Venezuela now as I did when I opened the book: not much at all, regrettably. "Our [family] history is like the history of a whole country," Benito says to Lydia on page 26, making the comparisons to Márquez's Buendía family all the more overt, but, aside from one passage towards the very end (corrupt governments "tyrannized the country's economy with their transitory oil" (pg. 206)), I did not get any focused sense of Venezuelan society or Andean culture. St. Aubin de Terán's tracing is obscure; we're going through the literary motions as we read, but there's not much that moves.

That said, Keepers of the House is always a worthwhile read. The writing is very capable and the characters are well-drawn, though it was sometimes hard to follow the through-line of the story. After a slow and unfocused start (to the point where choosing to read it begins to seem like a mistake), the novel picks up around Chapter Two. The decision to move from one generation to another keeps things fresh, and the shortness of the book means it doesn't sag like Márquez's more vaunted novel sometimes could. You have to tackle each chapter separately, resetting on characters and plot at the end of each one before going again, but once you realise this is how you have to approach it, the book becomes much more enjoyable.

It's a dark and brutal novel at times, filled with unloved spinsters and widows, destitute peasants, a village massacre and an involuntary amputation, but I was pleased to be surprised at some of the interesting directions the book took me into. If, at the end, I still hadn't grown to love it, I had been charmed by it. Its literary depth may remain elusive, but if Keepers of the House is ultimately a more approachable facsimile of Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, there's certainly worse things for a novel to be. But to truly explore Venezuela, the Land of Grace, in fiction, I'll have to look elsewhere. ( )

79/2021. Keepers of the House, by Lisa St Aubin de Terán, is supposedly a semi-autobiographical novel, although the present date in the book is around 15 years too early for the author's time in Venezuela. The framing story is about a young English woman who marries into a landowning Venezuelan family and moves to her incapable husband's run-down sugar plantation in the Andes where she receives tenebrous tales of his family history from an elderly servant. The novel reads like a collection of short Hispanic-gothic literary fairytales about the rural gentry. These stories tell of lonely death, massacre, in-breeding, madness, disease, and famine (imagine if Aunt Ada Doom from Cold Comfort Farm came from Latin American rural gentry and had written a family history). Not my sort of thing, and nearly a dnf, but that's not the book's fault.

Quote

One of many wtf moments: "She had watched ducks drown, many times, in their own element. They had lifted their necks as though to give thanks for the rain, and, opening their throats in adoration, the rainwater choked them." ( )