‘Niagara’, by Joyce Carol Oates: of falls and abysses

The author of the message is the reverend of the Presbyterian Church Gilbert Erskine, with whom Ariah has just married – a 1950s – and The honeymoon are passing at a lavish hotel of the Niagara cataracts, a very popular and chosen tourist destination mostly by couples of newly married. Where has her husband gone?

The goalkeeper of the spectacular cataract of La Herradura saw a man on his hanging bridge at a quarter past six in the morning, which alarmed the alarm, then, as remembered in one of the appointments headed by the work, Niágara Falls They were known as “the paradise of suicides” to dismay of the inhabitants of the area and travel agencies.

It is soon discovered that Gilbert Erskine is already part of the large statistics from which his life were taken there, perhaps of a rare badly called hydracopsíico and his wife confesses; “Am a newly married one that has become a widow in less than a day». However, it will not take long to abandon that state. He will meet the prestigious lawyer Dirk Burnaby, who becomes his second husband, and with him who will have three children.

Burnaby’s entry opens a parallel plot, focused on collective demand in The Love Channel Conflictwhich will be in charge of Dirk Burnaby. The Love Channel occurred in reality. In that place, close to cataracts, there was a huge environmental disasterbecause a company poured tons of toxic waste. And, also, we are told by the avatars of the children of Ariah and Dirk Burnaby, until they reach a surprise outcome, after an achieved portrait of characters, starting with its protagonist, never in black and white.

Throughout the monumental ‘Niagara’, novels of long breath always offers us, very dear and worked for oates – lAs cracks of American society, the buried violence that threatens to explode, the greed of the powerful ..—. Here, with the background of the cataracts, he builds a powerful metaphor, since the human being does not stop living harassed by the feeling of guilt of the first sin, the fall – he puts with the double meaning of ‘The Falls’, English title – that expelled him from Eden, and always places him on the edge of the abyss.

With a copious production, with more than a hundred titles, the last ‘butcher’, the many times candidate for the Nobel transgressor, disturbing and non -dildo». Excellent currency.