Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Columbian Nobel prize-winner, uses a poetic form for his parable "THE INCREDIBLE AND MELANCHOLY STORY OF ERENDIRA AND HER HEARTLESS GRANDMOTHER", reaching back into the past to compose a poetic legend about the subjugation and liberation of the peoples of Latin America.
The mode of existance forced on the title figure, Erendira, reveals basic historical experiences fundamental to the past of Latin America; slavery, rape, expolitation and the vision of Utopia based on a leap into the future which is to destroy the misery. The heroine is incapable of escaping from her grandmother's despotism with her own strength. Abused as a serving-girl, sold to men and forced into prostitution, she remains a helpless, unwilling victim of the power of the past, as symbolised by the grandmother. Until one day she is liberated by Ulysse, a youth whose figure expresses the changing times, who disposes of the remnants of the past by force.
But the heroine rejects the courtship of her liberator on favour of the urge for freedom common to individuals and nations that refuse any rulers at all - indeed an incredible story!
The cinema adaptation of the literary work has been performed by the Brazilian director Ruy Guerra. It is a congenial synthesis of literary and cinematic creation; Guerra has succeeded in transforming the deeply metaphorical and symbolic prose into a film packed with expressive shots.
(Stuttgarter Zeitung)