Baldomero Lillo (1867–1923)

I read Baldomero Lillo's Subterra as crews were completing the final stages of the drilling effort to reach the 33 miners trapped underground in Chile. When I read about the incident that trapped the miners underground, I thought of this book, because I remembered that it painted a very vivid picture of the difficult conditions in the mines of Chile a century ago. It does, and it's interesting to wonder about how different the recently freed miners' lives are from the men and children whose stories are told in these stories. At its best, this collection of short stories gives me similar feelings of uneasiness in my stomach to those I remember experiencing in high school when I read the scenes in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle documenting the conditions in the meatpacking plants of Chicago. The mine here is depicted as a monstrous entity that chews up strong, young men and spits them out as old, worn out remnants of their former robust selves. Death via accidents and explosions down in the mine is a constant possibility, and the foreign bosses of the mine treat their workers as expendable animals.

Lillo does a good job of creating (mostly) plausible scenarios that lay bare the suffering that the miners of the late 19th-and early-20th endured. I felt indignant as I read about how the workers were only allowed to purchase food and other goods at the mine's commissary, at prices that ate away at their wages to the point where on payday they were often left owing the mine money, even after pawning off their possessions in order to buy just enough food to get by until the next paycheck. Their treatment at the hands of the mine foremen was despicable, and the stories that are set in the mines do a good job of conveying the unfairness of their treatment, and the despair that the workers felt at being trapped in an inhumane situation. It seems obvious that the author is writing in the hopes of inspiring changes in the mines of Chile, and after reading this book, I wonder what effect his stories might have had on the working conditions in Chile's mining industry.

I was a bit disappointed when the stories began to wander away from the mines and into the surrounding communities and Chilean countryside. I think that Lillo is at his best when he is depicting life underground, and I really enjoyed reading the stories and thinking about how the story of the miners trapped in the mine in 2010 was stranger and more unbelievable than the mining stories written by Lillo a century ago. I also couldn't help but imagine how the story would have gone if Lillo would have written it back then: the group of 33 miners, trapped in a chamber in the bowels of the mine, would probably have been left to die a slow and horrific death, forgotten nearly immediately by a foreign administration that viewed them as eminently expendable. The scenario would have fit well with the other stories in this book, and it's interesting to think about how different the world is now (maybe) than it was a century ago. I was given this book as a going away present when I left Santiago, Chile more than six years ago, and I am always absorbed by stories in the news involving Chile. It's a beautiful, wonderful country, and it was interesting to step back in its history through this book.… (mehr)