Marcelo's Reading and Thinking Log

The first edition of this came out in 1929. It's not a bad book, although I must confess most of my pleasure was derived from thinking about its plot after I had finished reading it. The author is intriguingly (and irritatingly) fond of commas, which appear invariably in the wrong places. Here's a summary of the plot. A traveling salesman stops at a farm and asks for shelter. He is so well lodged and taken care of that he ends up spending quite some time there. Upon arrival he makes eye contact with the farmer's daughter; he falls in love instantly. The daughter happens to be engaged in a very bizarre way to the son of a rival family. The bizarreness consists in the fact that he will have to get her by force; this is meant as a form of retribution for the fact that her father took his wife - her mother - by force (against her family's will, yet not against hers) from that same rival family. The girl is visibly sad about the whole situation, to which she was forced by her father to conform. Throughout the stranger's stay, she remains confined to her quarters. The guy is led to believe that she liked him because of the strange tidying up and flowers in his bedroom, which he thinks were done in his absence by her. One night, he sees her in the backyard alone, sneaks up to her, grabs her from behind, and gives her a kiss. She slaps him and scolds him. He asks her to marry him, but she rejects him and reenters the house. He decides to leave the farm (not in the very next day, but in the day after that, to avoid suspicions). When that day comes, he says goodbye to the farmer and his wife and rides away. When he is preparing to camp for his first night out, he sees the farm's handyman coming to fetch him on the farmer's orders, "dead or alive". He returns with the fellow to the farm, where everything is being readied for his wedding. It appears that the girl accused him of having sex with her. He is infuriated but goes along with the wedding anyway. In the night after the wedding, all is explained as a misunderstanding which she didn't rebuke because she wanted him back. Also, her mother had been secretly plotting their romance, with the flowers in his bedroom, and also with presents which she gave her, pretending they were from him. It turns out that he was the way the older woman found to rid her daughter from the cruel destiny imposed to her by the girl's father.