The latest addition to my website is José María Arguedas‘s Los ríos profundos (Deep Waters). This novel, praised by Mario Vargas Llosa as one of the great Peruvian novels, is a semi-autobiographical novel. Arguedas’ mother died when he was two and a half. When his father remarried, his stepmother already had three children. He was left to the Indian servants, so he ended up with a lifelong love for the native culture and spoke fluent Quechua. In this novel, the fourteen-year old Ernesto follows his father, a travelling lawyer, around Peru, till they stop at Abancay where the father moves on, while Ernesto is sent to school. We follow his lively school days at a religious school, lyrically described by Arguedas, including a salt revolt by the local women, with which he is very sympathetic, fights, girls, and struggling to fit in, ending with an epidemic