Tag: Mexico

Review 2608: The Night Ocean

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At first, I thought this novel was going to be about H. P. Lovecraft. Then, I thought it was a sort of homage to 30s and 40s science fiction and horror writers. But having finished it, I don’t know quite how to describe it.

Marina Willett’s husband Charlie is missing or dead. A writer of insightful profiles, Charlie began working on one of H. P. Lovecraft. During his research, he became interested in the story of a book purportedly written by Lovecraft’s much-younger deceased friend Robert Barlow that alleged a homosexual affair. This book was debunked as a fraud perpetrated by Lovecraft fan L. C. Spinks. However, Charlie becomes convinced after visiting Spinks that he is actually Barlow, having faked his own death and taken Spinks’ identity. He publishes a book telling this story and immediately becomes a literary celebrity.

But then, evidence comes out about facts that are incorrect, and Charlie himself is believed to have perpetrated a fraud. After checking himself into a mental hospital, he disappears, his clothes found next to a lake.

Marina is not satisfied. She decides to revisit the research that Charlie conducted, in the hopes of figuring out what happened. Since the last thing he did before checking into the hospital was revisit Spinks, Marina goes to see him.

Most of the rest of the novel becomes a series of stories beginning with Spinks’ first interview with Charlie. These stories name-drop 30s and 40s science fiction and horror writers and other prominent figures like crazy. This technique of the strange tale is one familiar to horror readers and a nod to Lovecraft.

If I were a bigger Lovecraft fan, I’d probably recognize more allusions besides the obvious ones—his fanboy-cum-writers themselves dropping his made-up words into their conversations, for example.

I think that Lovecraft fans will appreciate this novel more than I did, but the novel leaves Lovecraft behind about halfway through, and becomes more about Barlow. Myself, I got a little tired of the structure of story after story.

The novel is ultimately about identity, search for community, and reinvention.

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Review 2555: Angle of Repose

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Again, when I finished reading this book, which was supposed to be for my A Century of Books project, I found the year already occupied. I have been using Goodreads and often Wikipedia to find books for each year, but Goodreads seems particularly inaccurate. I suspect that what happened here was that it listed the novel for, say, 1981, where I still have a hole (as of this writing in February), because of a 10-year anniversary reprint. I often check the dates if they seem suspicious, but this one didn’t. It’s especially bad now because it took eight days to read, and I am way behind on my reading. I only have a few more books to go, but from now on, I’m double-checking the publication date before I start reading.

Lyman Ward, a former academic just in his 50s, has contracted a bone disease that has frozen his neck so that he can’t turn it, confined him to a wheelchair, and resulted in the amputation of one of his legs. He is almost completely helpless, so his son wants to move him into care, but he stubbornly remains in his grandparents’ home in Grass Valley, California, being taken care of by Ada, a local woman.

His wife, Ellen, left him abruptly for his surgeon when he was helpless in the hospital. Although her partner died soon after and she has shown signs of wanting to return, he stubbornly refuses to see her.

Lyman can read, though, and do other sedentary activities. He was raised by his grandparents, and his grandmother was in her time a famous illustrator and writer, Susan Burling Ward. He has come across newspaper clippings and letters she wrote to her best friend, so he decides to write a biography of her, partly to answer questions for himself about events in his family he doesn’t understand.

Angle of Repose combines Lymon’s current experience and thoughts as he does this work with the events in the biography he is writing. The historical arc of the novel predominates, so much so that I occasionally wondered why Lyman’s story was there at all. However, by the end I understood how his grandparents’ history informs his own.

It’s a mismatch. Susan Barling as a young woman is from Upstate New York, a gifted artist just beginning to become known. She yearns for a life of culture. Her best friend, Augusta, comes from a prominent, cultured New York City family, and as young women, Susan and Augusta make a threesome of friends with Thomas Hudson, a poet and editor who goes on to become famous himself. She meets Oliver Ward, a young mining engineer, when she is very young. Unlike her other friends, he is taciturn and maybe too respectful of them all. He goes away on a job in the West for five years.

Thomas, sensitive, intelligent, and delicate, is Susan’s idea of a perfect man. He picks Augusta, though, and Oliver returns around the same time. Despite her friends’ misgivings, Susan decides to marry Oliver. Her idea is that Oliver can get some experience in the West and then move back East to live a more cultured life. She doesn’t seem to realize that to do his work, he must be in the West, and he is suited for that life.

As far as his career is concerned, Oliver seems too prone to consult Susan’s convenience, and she has unrealistic ideas. He turns down some opportunities because they don’t seem suitable to Susan. He takes a short-term job and they live apart. (She is too genteel for these rough mining camps.) She finally joins him near a mining town named New Almaden, southeast of San Jose. He has taken a house away from town, which anyway she removes herself from, as she does everywhere they live, thinking herself too good for the company. As Lyman says, his grandmother is a snob. Here she begins a pattern of not joining into society and their life but enduring it.

The couple doesn’t thrive financially. At this time, there are lots of qualified engineers available and most of them aren’t as fussy about where they’ll go. Susan’s work writing articles about the West and illustrating other writers’ work is helping support them, despite Oliver’s dislike of the situation and Susan’s complaints about it. They move to Leadville, Colorado, which although it is primitive, allows her to open her home to some intelligent visitors and have lively, informed discussions, which she loves. But the Leadville mine eventually grinds to a halt because of a lawsuit brought by would-be claim jumpers.

The couple goes to Mexico, which Susan loves, but the mine doesn’t prove promising. Their projects gain and then lose funding, and so on.

Susan writes to Augusta constantly, but Augusta never acknowledges Oliver as a fit husband. I fear that much of Susan’s growing disappointment has to do with wanting to justify her choice to her friends.

In the novel’s current time (the late 1960s and early 70s), Lyman expresses some irritating views on the times and young people. I wasn’t sure whether they were Stegner’s own views or more delineation of Lyman’s character, but Lyman eventually forms a sort of friendship with a young woman who acts as his secretary for a time.

This is ultimately a fascinating and absorbing story, but this time through (I apparently read it in the mists of time but didn’t remember anything about it) I kept getting distracted from it. I’m not sure why. I think, though, that it deserved more attention from me. Although I was bothered by Lyman seeming to blame all his grandparents’ problems on his grandmother (and after unfortunate events, his grandfather’s intransigence), the novel is considered Stegner’s masterpiece and won him the Pulitzer.

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Review 2491: The Book of Lamentations

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When I put this novel on my Classics Club list, I was looking for a few classics written originally in a foreign language. So, I chose this novel without knowing much about it.

It is set in Chiapas, a remote state in the far south of Mexico. At first, you might think it is set in the 19th century, but it is actually set in the 1930s, at a time when Mexico began to exact reforms that would return portions of the wealthy ranches to the native population.

One of the first images that indicates the treatment of the native population is that of travelers sitting in chairs that are strapped to Indians, who carry the people through the mountains. (I’m using the term “Indian” because the book does.) The Introduction says that Castellanos experienced this as a child.

I was confused at first, because the novel starts out with one group of people only to switch to another and another before bringing their stories together.

Although other characters are introduced first, the action starts with Marcela, a young native girl, traveling into the city of Cuidad Real to sell pots. She is told by a Ladina woman to bring the pots to her house. What she doesn’t know is that Doña Mercedes is a procuratress, and Mercela ends up being raped by Don Leonardo Cifuentes, who likes them young.

Returning home, she is rebuffed by her parents until she is taken under the wing of Catalina Díaz Puilgir, an ilol (sort of a sorceress) and her husband Pedro González Winiktón. She is made to marry Catalina’s brother Lorenzo, a man of limited intellect, and eventually has a child. And that’s all we see of her until much later.

Suddenly we switch to Cuidad Real and the lives of the Ladino characters. Leonardo Cifuentes, a wealthy rancher, is married to Isabel and probably murdered her first husband. Her daughter, Idolina, has taken to her bed since her father’s death. Leonardo has been courting a newcomer to town, Julia Acevedo, the supposed wife of Fernando Ulloa, the engineer who has been sent by the government to survey the ranches in preparation for the land reforms.

So far, Julia has avoided Cifuentes’s advances and made friends with his daughter. Her attempts, however, to be accepted by the rest of the Ladinas in the upper classes are unsuccessful. Instead of staying properly at home, she walks around town with her red hair flowing, earning her the nickname “La Alazana.”

The real issue in the novel is the land reform, which the ranchers oppose. However, an excuse for violent action comes when Catalina finds a cave with ancient stone figures in it. She gains a large following among the Indians by falling into trances in the cave and making utterances. The ranchers use the excuse of the large gatherings to claim that the Indians are planning a revolt. And violence eventually follows.

The novel is acerbically written, with no totally likable characters but with sympathy for the Mayan outcasts, who don’t really understand what is going on most of the time. They don’t understand the language or the mode of thought of the Ladinos, and when questioned later by authorities, since they don’t understand the questions, they just answer yes or no at random.

This novel was difficult to read. It wasn’t just the subject matter but more how the novel would jump to a new set of characters and tell a lot about them only to have them vanish for many pages. I may have also had problems because I was on vacation and then sick while trying to read it. But I was determined to finish it, and did. Although the novel is sympathetic to the native peoples of the area, to the modern eye it is also patronizing.

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Review 2109: Orphans of the Carnival

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After reading Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie, I had high expectations for Orphans of the Carnival, especially as it had in common the carnival setting. However, my reactions to this novel were much more mixed.

The subject of the novel is a woman who really existed, Julia Pastrana, a 19th century performer. Julia was more than a performer, though. She was a famous “freak” at a time when such shows were popular. She is described only here and there and in pieces so that we slowly get an idea of what she looked like, but she was labeled an ape-woman, among other names.

The novel opens as Julia has decided to take up a showman’s offer and leave her home in Mexico, where she works as a servant, to travel to New Orleans to work in a sideshow. But her hunger for travel and adventure is stifled, because her boss wants her to stay out of view except when she’s on exhibit, discouraging her from even walking around heavily veiled, as she usually does.

Julia eventually changes agents and quickly becomes world famous, being an accomplished performer and speaking several languages. But she yearns for a fulfilling private life.

The trouble is, Birch didn’t succeed in making Julia an interesting personality. This problem may be because she was a real person and Birch didn’t want to take too many liberties, but sometimes I want to say to authors, “Your characters aren’t inherently interesting even if you put them in interesting situations. You have to make them interesting.” Further, she doesn’t do much with the carnival setting.

Birch also uses at least one anachronism when she puts Julia in pantyhose. Pantyhose wasn’t actually invented until 1959 and was called “panty legs” at first. The term “pantyhose” didn’t become common until the mid-1960’s.

There is also a present-time story about a woman who fills her apartment with lots of odd objects she’s picked up. There seems to be no connection between the two story lines until the very end of the book. However, when they do link up, the connecting is haunting.

The end of the novel is very much the best part of the book, but otherwise I had trouble staying with it and read two other books in between starting and finishing it. This for me means I am having trouble concentrating on the one I’m reading.

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Review 2025: Mexican Gothic

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It’s 1950 Mexico City. Noemí Taboada is a university student, but mostly she’s a socialite from a wealthy family aiming to have as much fun as possible.

Noemí’s father has received a disturbing letter from her cousin Catalina, who recently married a man no one knows very well. It sounds like Catalina is mentally disturbed. So, he asks Noemí to visit Catalina to find out what’s going on.

Catalina has married Virgil Doyle, the son of silver mine owners originally from England. But the silver has run out, and Noemí finds High Place a crumbling Victorian mansion. The family is not welcoming, and they impose a lot of rules, including only infrequent visits to Catalina. Catalina herself seems at first simply ill—she has tuberculosis—but later babbles about something listening, something in the walls.

Although the youngest son of the family, Francis, is friendly and helps her out, the rest of the family remains cold. Noemí herself begins having bizarre dreams.

Some readers may have a problem with how slowly this novel gets going, because the only thing that happens for quite a while is these dreams, but eventually the action picks up. Other readers have complained at the unlikelihood of the secrets revealed. That bothered me at first, but then I thought it was in the spirit of the original gothic novels. I decided it wasn’t any less likely than the notion of vampires or zombies and in these days a lot more original.

The novel is atmospheric, the heroine feisty, the ending quite suspenseful. It delivers what it promises.

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Review 1373: The Queen of the Caribbean

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I was intrigued enough when I wrote my Classic Author Focus article on Emilio Salgari for The Classics Club that I ordered one of his books. Salgari was an early 20th century adventure novelist whose work inspired other writers and film makers.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really do my homework and ended up picking a book with an appealing cover and title. The problem was that it is the second in Salgari’s Black Corsair series. Unlike many old adventure series—I’m thinking of, for example, Tom Swift—The Queen of the Caribbean depends heavily on its predecessor, The Black Corsair, which I had of course never read.

I was a bit taken aback when I opened the book to find a modern map of Southern Mexico and Central America labeled “West Indies, 1600.” The only concession to the 1600’s was a hasty label “New Spain.” Panama, which wasn’t even a country until a couple of years before the book was published in 1905, was delineated. Apparently, Salgari or his publishers (assuming this was a map that appeared in the original publication and not a creation for the republished copy) chose to use modern place names, some of them even in English.

Other than that, Salgari appears to have some knowledge of pirates, sea-going, and the flora and fauna of Mexico and Florida. Unfortunately, he sometimes stops the action dead in its tracks to tell us about some plant or animal. In a way, this book reminds me of those of W. H. G. Kingston, which I had a small collection of that never reappeared after our move. However, Kingston was better at working his facts into the story.

The Black Corsair is pursuing his enemy, Van Guld, who betrayed his followers in battle. Later, after the Black Corsair and his brothers turned pirate in pursuit of their enemy, Van Guld was responsible for the deaths of the corsair’s brothers. All this apparently happened in the first book. In The Queen of the Caribbean, this pursuit leads them to attack Vera Cruz, an event that actually happened. During the search in Vera Cruz for Van Guld, the Black Corsair hears rumors that his lady love, who he thought was dead, may be alive.

Although the Black Corsair behaves nobly, he doesn’t seem at all disturbed by the mayhem wrought upon innocent people by his pirate friends. Perhaps Salgari was attempting to portray pirates more realistically than is usual in adventure fiction. He seems, however, to have an admiration for what are essentially bloodthirsty cutthroats. I don’t think I’m applying my 21st century standards here, because I’ve managed to enjoy many other adventure novels, including ones about pirates. The characters in this one are cardboard figures being put through their paces.

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Day 1001: The Story of My Teeth

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Cover for The Story of My TeethHi, all, apparently I actually published this article by mistake last week. It was supposed to come out today. So here it is again.

* * *

I enjoy the occasional experimental novel, especially one that plays with structure, but The Story of My Teeth was a bit too much for me. It begins with a fairly straightforward narrative, although a whimsical plot, but at each section does something different.

Gustavo (Highway) Sánchez Sánchez claims to be the world’s best auctioneer. He has accumulated a collection of teeth belonging to famous people and agrees to auction them off for the church. But his long-lost son Siddhartha shows up at the auction and things begin to get strange.

Perhaps I should have had more patience with this novel, because I quit reading it just before the New York Times review claimed it got really interesting. I stopped reading in “The Allegories,” and that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me. I just got a feeling of terrific impatience and realized I wasn’t enjoying the novel. So, I stopped.

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Day 66: The Lacuna

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Cover for The LacunaBest Book of Week 14!

My experience with reading Barbara Kingsolver has been uneven. Her first books were interesting and heartwarming, but some of her later work is more political and sometimes degenerates to lecturing on certain causes. However, The Lacuna is an absolutely enthralling historical novel.

Harrison Shepherd is a young man, half Mexican and half American, who survives an upbringing by a feckless mother and a cold father and finally begins making his own way in 1930’s Mexico. He finds a job working in Diego Rivera’s kitchen and ends up as the cook and plaster mixer in Rivera’s household with Frida Kahlo. Later, when they give Leon Trotsky a home, Shepherd works for Trotsky as a secretary and translator, and finally he returns to the United States to write Aztec historical potboilers.

The novel covers major historical events in a turbulent period, including the Communist Worker’s Movement, Trotsky’s assassination, FDR’s terms in Washington, World War II, and the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Although Shepherd’s life is extraordinary by any standards, Kingsolver was able to make it feel absolutely persuasive. While I usually dislike historical novels where ordinary people keep running into famous people, I completely accepted every sentence of this book.

Told by diary entries, newspaper articles, and letters, the novel gets going a little slowly, but eventually enthralls. Kingsolver does a great job of creating colorful and believable characters from the lives of real, historic people, something that is not simple, and completely involves readers in the events of their lives.