FORDLANDIA

Argentinean Sguiglia’s excellent first novel is based on a historical incident: automaker Henry Ford’s failed attempt, in 1929, to produce his own rubber at a plantation (and city bearing his name) craved out of Brazil’s Amazon jungle. Sguiglia juxtaposes “Fordlandia’s” battles against poisonous snakes and insects, rebelling workers, and a “plague” that attacks newly planted trees (as observed and endured by the narrator, the plantation’s “personnel director”) with brief scenes set in Detroit, where Ford—an impatient incarnation of the Western work ethic—labors to blunt the effects of the coming Depression. The ongoing “struggle between tractors and the primitive world”—a conflict that continues to resonate, and seemingly defies resolution—makes for both potent allegory and absorbing realistic drama.