The Bridge in the Jungle by B. Traven

Life and death in a tropical village

I only discovered B. Traven about a year ago. Since then, I’ve read four of his novels, and three out of the four have been superb. The Bridge in the Jungle is the best one yet. It was first published in German in 1928, then in English translation in 1939. Traven was born in Germany and worked as a sailor for a while before settling in Mexico in the 1920s. It is unclear how long he lived there, but almost all of his books take place in Mexico. The Bridge in the Jungle is set in an unspecified location in Central America, though that term may be used vaguely enough here to encompass Chiapas in Southern Mexico, where Traven was known to have spent some time. Traven published a series of a half a dozen novels known as his Jungle series. Confusingly, however, The Bridge in the Jungle is not part of that series, but rather a precursor to it.

The novel is narrated by an American drifter who is once referred to by the name of Gales. (Traven readers will recognize Gerald or Gerard Gales, the name Traven commonly applied to his protagonists, though his Gales books don’t necessarily constitute a series.) This narrator visits his fellow American friend Sleigh, who lives in the middle of the jungle with his Indian wife and a few head of cattle. A bridge built by an oil company crosses a river there. Next to the bridge is a water pumping station owned by the railroad. Gathered around the bridge is a poor and tiny riverside village comprised of a few squalid huts and ramshackle houses, including Sleigh’s.

Gales and Sleigh attend a party that’s being held in the village near the pump station. It’s an impromptu dance held in someone’s front yard. Villagers of all ages attend, bringing food or musical instruments or whatever else they can contribute. At first, it takes a while for this party to get off the ground. The promised musicians are no-shows, and Gales and Sleigh are clearly disappointed. For a while, it seems like this is what the book is going to be about: a bummer of a party in the middle of nowhere. The occasion is disrupted, however, when an unforeseen crisis befalls one of the families of the village. The nature of this catastrophe is best left unsaid here, to avoid spoiling too much of the plot. What the novel relates, however, is how the entire population of the village accepts the stricken family’s troubles as their own and comes to their aid and support.

This is not a feel-good story, however. It is a vivid immersion into the reality of life among the rural poor in a developing country. I’ve traveled enough in Mexico to appreciate the gritty realism of Traven’s depictions of that country. While I may be merely a dilettante tourist, he was the real deal who lived the life of the drifters about whom he wrote (see also The Cotton-Pickers and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). The village depicted in The Bridge in the Jungle is no doubt based on a community among which Traven lived for some time, and his vivid recollections bring this world to life. He doesn’t just describe the trappings of these people’s environment but also lets the reader in on their thought processes and philosophy of life. Here, as in all of his books, Traven includes some pro-socialist, anti-imperialist comments, but such social criticism plays a minor role in a story that is much more personal than political.

While reading The Bridge in the Jungle, I couldn’t help wondering how a writer like Hemingway is immortalized with a Nobel Prize while Traven is allowed to fade into obscurity. This novel is more powerful than anything I’ve read by Hemingway and at least as profound as William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, without all the annoying stream-of-consciousness wordplay. Traven’s writing delivers the unvarnished realism of a John Steinbeck or Jack London but without any of their literary pretensions. The more I read of his work, the more impressed I am by the perceptive naturalism and plainspoken style of his storytelling.