The Vortex

Published in 1924, José Eustasio Rivera's The Vortex follows the harrowing adventures of the young poet Arturo Cova and his lover Alicia as they elope and flee from Bogotá into the wild and woolly backcountry of Colombia. A major work of twentieth-century Latin American literature, The Vortex is both a denunciation of the sensational human-rights abuses that took place during the Amazonian rubber boom and one of the most famous literary renderings of the Amazonian rainforest.