The Lariat is a 1927 short novel by the poet and anthropologist Jaime de Angulo, set in Spanish California.
The Lariat is a story told through myriad voices with frequently shifting verb tenses, ultimately dissolving into a patchwork collection of scenes and impressions.
Through these voices emerges the story of Fray Luis, a Spanish Franciscan friar with a wild secular past, who comes to Mission Carmel in Northern California with the goal of converting the local Native Americans to Christianity.
Ruiz, a Mestizo vaquero associated with the Mission, begins a covert relationship with the Esselen girl, sneaking her out of the nunnery at night.
Fray Luis goes to Hualala's funeral, where he is involuntarily involved in a ceremony to relieve the Esselen community of the burdon of the death.
Fray Luis ends up living for a few weeks at the house of Esteban, Ruiz's Spanish father.
Ruiz decides that he wants to kill the bear that has been eating their cattle, and asks the Mission Indian Saturnino to make him a lariat.
Saturnino, who hates Ruiz, uses a piece of Fray Luis's monk's cord to weave a lariat.
The lariat looks and feels perfect but its integrity is compromised by the addition of the cord, so it does not work properly when the time comes.
As Fray Luis flees back up the ladder that goes out the hole in the center of the hut, he puts his head through the loop of a waiting lariat, and is hung.
The chapter titles provide clues, though sometimes they do not seem directly connected to their context ("Fray Luis tries to double-cross the Devil," for example).
Halfway down the slope, a little flat, with a few Indian huts, and a small house of logs and adobe, with a chimney.
[1]: 119 There is a lot of "mixing" of opposites in this story that is a direct result of the physical and cultural setting: Catholic and Animist practice, Native American and European reminiscent of Estela Portillo Trambley’s "The Burning"[2] which juxtaposes Europe versus the New World, aristocracy and peasantry, light and dark, justice and evil.
They live in the dream-space intensity of personal vision and in the shared cosmic ordering of words and actions that people of knowledge perform in ceremony.
The work is multivocal, told from multiple viewpoints, and retains the dialogic properties that are the basis of all Native American oral tradition.
The description of the rope on page 93 seems a lot like the magic realism in Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Plodding readers, those who are mired in everyday "reality" will be shocked or skeptical of talking animals or mice traveling via moonbeam.