The Cabin by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Short but powerful naturalist novel of Spain

Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928) published his fifth novel, La Barraca, in 1898. In English, the book is titled The Cabin or The Shack. The novel takes place in a huerta, or farming community, outside the city of Valencia, which is located on the Mediterranean Coast of Spain. The farmers who comprise the novel’s cast do not own the land on which they live and work. They rent from a landlord who lives in the city. Most of the families in the huerta are struggling to make ends meet, and many owe debts and back rent to the landowner.

In the opening chapter, Pepeta, a farmwife, brings her goods to market in Valencia. In the city, she runs into a former neighbor who is now a prostitute. Pepeta remembers when this young woman was once a respectable farmer’s daughter. This inspires a flashback to a momentous event in the history of the huerta. A poor, hardworking farmer named Barret (the prostitute’s father) suffers the persecution of his oppressive landlord, Don Salvador, which leads to a violent altercation between peasant and master. The Barrets are driven from their land, leaving their farm and its barraca vacant for many years. The other residents of the huerta see this unoccupied, unproductive land as a symbol of rebellious pride, a thorn in the side of the rich landowners. One day, however, a new family appears at the huerta, their belongings in tow. To everyone’s surprise, the newcomers take up residence on the old Barret farm. Much like scabs would be viewed by strikers, these interlopers are treated with hostility and animosity by their neighbors. Although the new resident, Batiste, is just a poor and industrious farmer struggling to succeed like everyone else, he and his family are shunned and antagonized by the other families of the huerta.

Though largely forgotten by American readers these days (who would be hard-pressed to name any Spanish novel other than Don Quixote), Blasco Ibáñez was highly respected and widely read by English-language readers and critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The English edition of The Cabin alone sold over a million copies. Blasco Ibáñez wrote in the style of naturalism that was forged and popularized decades earlier by French author Émile Zola. In fact, Blasco Ibáñez is the first author I’ve come across who can do Zola’s style as well as Zola himself. That’s not to say that the Spanish author is merely an imitator of his predecessor. Active roughly a quarter century after Zola, Blasco Ibáñez brings naturalism into the modern world of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.

Naturalism is a form of realism that aims to document modern life in rich detail and unflinching verisimilitude without shying away from subject matter traditionally considered difficult, ugly, or unseemly. Drawing from modern science and social science, naturalism generally depicts its characters as not being masters of their own destiny but rather as slaves to forces of nature and nurture—evolution, heredity, economics, politics—that shape their identities and influence the course of their lives. This is apparent in La Barraca as animosity and violence escalate the Barrets and their neighbors, when everyone’s real enemy is the system of feudalistic peonage that enslaves them.

The joy of reading old books by dead guys is that every once in a while you discover a writer whose work you really love, and that author has twenty or thirty books that you’ve never heard of that you can now look forward to reading. Such is the case with Blasco Ibáñez, my latest discovery. The Cabin is the second of his novels that I’ve read, and both have been excellent. This is a short novel, smaller in size and more intimate in scale than his epic The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, but a lot of emotional power is packed into this small package.