The bore of Cabora

Late in the summer, when I was still reading The Maias and took it to the beach one afternoon to read, I saw someone sprawled out with his own book and asked him about it. It happened to be a book of short stories by Luis Alberto Urrea. I have a novel by Urrea, which I'd bought about a year earlier and set aside to read later, so I asked him what he thought of the author's style. He praised it and I made a mental note. Visiting Pilsen for Día de Muertos naturally stirred my interest in things Mexican again and, as a result of that encountre, it was the first title that came to mind.

Sad to say, it was only a somewhat satisfying read. From a slow start I ended up engrossed and moved at times. Urrea has some moments of inspiration but also stretches where my suspension of disbelief began to falter. Historical fiction is hard. You don't want the idiom to be too stilted, but make it too contemporary and it comes off as anachronistic. It's especially difficult, I think, to avoid putting in metaphors which--realistically speaking--would be outside the characters' frame of reference. (This is even more of a problem with fantasy.) One chunk in particular struck me as a clichéd revealing-late-night-conversation-in-the-kitchen scene only slightly modified for late-19th century circumstances, though it ultimately succeeded due to the gentle humour and warm rapport between the two protagonists.

Blurbs for the book really pointed up to me the incompetence of most reviewers. At least three made comparisons to One hundred years of solitude. There's no reason to, and not just because Urrea is no Gabo. Just because a Latin American is writing about fantastic events, that doesn't make the result magical realism. The defining feature of this as a genre is not the supernatural character of the events but the prosaic response of the characters to them. My favourite example is that scene in García Márquez' classic where, after many years of being shut up in her bedroom, Remedios the Beauty ascends bodily into the heavens amid a cloud of bedsheets. Members of the household chase after her begging her to cast these valuable linens back to earth so they can reuse them.

Compare this to a central scene in The hummingbird's daughter where young "Saint" Teresa of Cabora comes back to life after lying in state for three days. The women keeping vigil run screaming out of the house, eventually causing such an uproar that one of the ranch hands rushes in pistol drawn and nearly shoots the girl. Afterwards her father, an outspoken freethinker, is depicted as searching for some sort of rational explanation for the experience. Can you think of one García Márquez character who has ever done that?

The one parallel I do see is that this is more fuel to my complaint that all Latin American writers need to do is put their crazy family stories to paper to be hailed as original and imaginative: Teresa of Cabora is a cousin of Urrea's and her life a family legend (to the extent that he was shocked to discover that she was actually a real person). He also managed to include a lot of interesting detail on indigenous medical practices gleaned from various curanderos and brujas. But everyone comes through such an Americanising filter (whenever he attempts to put Teresa's life into some sort of historical context, his touchstones are always USAmerican) that much of the mystery is lost.

Last night, waiting for the Old Man to get back from something of a fool's errand, I began El beso de la mujer araña. The movie was a big deal when I was in high school, but I'd never really considered reading the novel until a friend of a friend gave it a rave review several years ago. Let's hope this one lives up a bit more to its reputation.