Horacio Quiroga

by Juan, Ezequiel, Luca and Felipe

Life of Horacio Quiroga 

He was born on December 31, 1878, in Salto, a town in Uruguay. And he died on February 19, 1937, in Buenos Aires.

    A tragic curiosity is that Quiroga was marked by various events throughout his life. Such as the death of his father in a hunting accident, and his stepfather and later his first wife committed suicide; Furthermore, he accidentally shot a friend to death.

     He began studying in Montevideo and during those years he became interested in literature. Being with his first girlfriend, he wrote "A Season of Love". And in 1899 he founded the "Revista de Salto" in his hometown.

     In 1900 he wrote "Diary of a trip to Paris". In this story, he tells of his experiences with Rubén Darío.

     Years later he would move to Buenos Aires. Where he would write "Los arrecifes de coral" and "El crímen de otro".

     In 1909 he settled precisely in the province of Misiones, where he served as justice of the peace in San Ignacio, a town famous for its ruins of the Jesuit missions, while growing yerba mate and oranges.

     Back in Buenos Aires, he worked at the Uruguayan consulate and gave the press collections of short stories.

    In 1927 he married a young friend of his daughter Eglé, with whom he had a daughter. Two years later he published the novel Pasado amor, without much success. Feeling the rejection of the new literary generations, he returned to Misiones to dedicate himself to floriculture. In 1935 he published his last book of short stories, Beyond. Hospitalized in Buenos Aires, he was discovered gastric cancer, a disease that seems to have been the cause that drove him to suicide, since he ended his days by ingesting cyanide.

    His first attempts were mere imitations of Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he shared a special preference for violence and madness; thus, some of his first stories, such as "The slaughtered chicken" or "The persecutor", can be classified within the so-called bloody stories.

Tales of the Jungle

This is a book made up of several stories. These stories have different plots. Let's take, for example, the story "The giant turtle." This story is about a man was always  sick and had to take care of his little brothers. A friend of this man sent him to the mountains to hunt animals to bring him the leather. For this job he would earn money to feed his brothers. Days passed and this man was cured. One day he saw that a lion was attacking a turtle. The hunter aimed his spit at the predator between its two eyes and blew its head off. The turtle was dying and its head hung from its body by three strands of flesh. So the man cared for her and cured her until one day the turtle woke up and the man got sick. When the turtle saw the hunter in that state, it took him to Buenos Aires so that he can be cured.

The Cutthroat Hen

This story tells the life of a young couple who had 5 children, four of them idiots. This marriage struggled for years to have a normal child. Until one day Bertita, daughter of Berta and Manzzini, were born. The parents were very happy and left the idiots to their fate. One day the servant of the house slaughtered a hen to make food, but she had not noticed the presence of the idiots. They were stunned by the color of the blood emanating from the hen. One day Bertita went to her brothers because she was bored, and they blew themselves away when they saw her sister. One of the four grabbed her by the neck and led her to the kitchen. The girl screamed but her parents did not hear their daughter's screams. After a while Manzzini entered the house and found a sea of ​​blood. The only thing he could do was give an empty but pain-filled scream.