THE HOUR OF GIVING.

By Luis J. Zalamea '42. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,1965. 293 pp. $4.95.

Four years ago this magazine reviewed Luis Zalamea's second volume of poetry, a five-canto invitation to the reader to penetrate the soul of his native country. The second canto, "? Como explicarte?," is addressed to Colombia herself: How can I explain thee to those who know thee not?

Zalamea, journalist, advertising executive, poet, editor, sometime matador, recent Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United Nations, and currently Director de Turismo for Colombia, has done a remarkably fine job portraying the beauty and the squalor, the despair and the hope of his native country in this his first novel.

The story is of the anguish and frustration of Hernán Zaldivar, a wealthy industrialist of Colombian aristocracy, in his inner struggle to free himself from the shackles of the decadent ruling society into which he was born. Both the man and the struggle personify the urgency of Colombia's need for social reform. The action is confined to three days of excruciating hangover and withdrawal symptoms suffered by Hernán as he tries to break his ties and gain new meaning to life. The fabric of the story is filled by three chapters devoted primarily to the reflective flashbacks of each of the principal characters: Hernán, his soulless wife Myriam, and their mulatto servant-girl Clota, in whom Hernan sees the good and the hope of his countrymen. The fourth and final chapter, "The Long Day," brings Hernan to dramatic action which conquers his personal conflict and symbolizes at least a faint ray of hope for Colombia's future.

The color of the journalist, the beauty of the poet, and the pathos of the social reformer are all reflected in Zalamea's work. Throughout the book is the strong feeling of urgency so apparent when the author wrote us a year ago, on returning to Bogota, that he "had visited Cuba on a humanitarian mission and had been shocked by what I saw into trying to do something in Colombia to avert another Castro-Communist takeover ... a novel on the present social situation of Colombia may be published next year in the U. S."

The highest accolade is paid Zalamea's work by Robert G. Mead Jr., writing for the Saturday Review: "The author stands alongside such dynamic writers as the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and our own Oscar Lewis in the effort to communicate through both fact and fiction the gravity and the imminence of the danger. Its deeper causes will be much better explained by such men as these than by official communiques, policy statements, and most news media."