Love World

Love World (Amor mundo) (1967) is a book by José María Arguedas, which contains the stories: “El horno viejo”, “La huerta”, “El ayla” and “Don Antonio”. In them, the teenager Santiago attends episodes that occurred in a hacienda in the Peruvian Andes.
It could be said that Love World is an erotic book. However, here sex is a disturbing, sordid and rampant maelstrom. Manhood is in Love the world an exercise of power and dominance, alien to romantic love or the discovery of desire. The characters portrayed here seek, equally, to provoke joy, suffering and submission.
This is a book that identifies the subaltern masculinity of the boy Santiago and the dominant masculinity of the landowner Don Guadalupe. The interaction of both characters occurs through a dynamic of apprentice-master. Both try to solve how their identities are played basically in the field of sexual relations. Consequently, how the male sex involves relations of power and pleasure with the female identities behind guilt.
The four stories of Love World have great thematic and plot unity. In them, the woman assumes the form of nature violated by man and the traumatic sexual initiation of the child Santiago is narrated.

• “The Old Oven” is a story about the traumatic sexual initiation of a nine-year-old boy. In the story he is forced by the boss to watch a rape and, later, to participate.
• “La huerta” is a continuation, with the same characters, of the story of “El horno viejo”. Sexual relations here are unpleasant and even traumatic for the boy Santiago.
• “El ayla” continues with the theme of sexual initiation, violent and disgusting for Santiago.
• Finally, in “Don Antonio” we find Santiago grown. He is already a young man. Don Antonio takes him to a brothel after a macho conversation about the sex of the man with his wife, with his mistress and with his whore.