The second novel by Leslie Marmon Silko, published in 1991, Almanac of the Dead has become one of my favorite fiction books ever. It's similar, in a general way, to The Fountain at the Center of the World, which I read and mentioned almost 2 years ago, in that both are touching personal stories set against a backdrop of sweeping historical and geopolitical forces and changes.
This is a book that's been sort of circulating and getting recommended amongst friends of mine here in Tucson, and everyone that's read it loves it. One reason for this is that much of the book takes place in Tucson and the surrounding area and has lots of local lore, but it also is chock-full of ideas that my progressive friends and I are already aware of and really interested in. These include such diverse issues as environmental destruction, water scarcity, sprawl, war profiteering, the homeless, indigenous land rights, racism, the border, corruption, colonialism, and just the general spiritual bankruptcy of european/western culture.
The novel is a big sprawling read (740 pages) that contains many different characters, plot threads, and places. Some of the threads intersect directly, some only refer to each other, and some never come together, or are just historical background. Some major characters/situations are: Lecha and Zeta, 2 Yaqui Indian twin sisters who live on a ranch on the outskirts of Tucson. In their youth Lecha was given by her grandmother a bundle of ancient notebooks called The Almanac of the Dead that have been handed down through many generations of indigenous people in Mexico. The Almanac tells the story of these people, who fled from the south of mexico centuries ago to escape "the destroyers," sorcerers who practiced blood sacrifice and became the Aztec rulers. The Almanac is also a history of the arrival of the europeans in the new world and a prophecy foretelling their departure from it, and the events of the prophecy seem to be starting to play out.
Lecha hires another main character, Seese, a coke addict from San Diego, to help her transcribe the Almanac into a computer, because Lecha is getting old. Seese has come to Tucson to find Lecha, because Lecha has psychic powers that allow her to find murder victims, and Seese wants to find out if her kidnapped baby has died. Meanwhile Zeta and Farro, Lecha's son, are arms and drug smugglers along with some other local Yaquis.
Down in Chiapas another subplot involves a corrupt general and his business partner who are getting guns from the U.S. They are worried about a recent upsurge of indigenous restlessness in the region. La Escapia is a Mayan woman who is part of a secret army of poor villagers all over Chiapas preparing for an armed rebellion. (remember, this was written at least 3 years before the Zapatista uprising!) She goes to Mexico City to attend a secret Cuban "freedom school" that teaches about Marxism in exchange for providing arms and weapons for insurgents around Latin America. The mayans don't care about Cuba or Marx, but they pretend they do just to get weapons. All they care about is taking back their land. The ideology is just bullshit to them.
Meanwhile back in Tucson an East Coast mafia family is starting to move in on Zeta's smuggling operation. They work with a corrupt senator and a clandestine agent from the CIA to smuggle arms into southern Mexico and Central America in exchange for cocaine. They're also involved in shady real estate development and building huge water-sucking suburbs, buying off judges to head off the environmental lawsuits filed against them. A lover of the wife has a "biomaterial" business that secretly harvests organs and plasma from homeless people and Indians, but 2 of his employees are organizing a Homeless Army in Tucson and around the country, waiting for the right time to rise up.
Yet another meanwhile, Seese's ex-boyfriend, an artist named David, is in with some rich racist drug and porn dealers from Argentina and Columbia named Beaufrey and Serlo. David kidnaps his and Seese's baby and heads down to Serlo's ranch in Columbia with Beaufrey, but Beaufrey gets jealous and has the baby kidnapped from David and makes it look like Seese did it. During all this Serlo is working on a crazy post-apocalypse eugenics scheme to preserve the "sangre pura" master race in sealed biospheres at his ranch.
You start to see how complex the web that Silko weaves is. It's really addictive reading, infused with a dark ambiance, great historical anecdotes and references to the injustices of the past, as well as tons of moral ambiguity - virtually every major character, with maybe 2 or 3 exceptions, is either a loser, a depraved asshole, or some kind of greedy conartist or corrupt official. The narrative hops around the Western hemisphere and over the last 500 years, and my one big criticism is that it doesn't seem to tie stuff together quite well enough at the end - it could have gone on for another 200 pages and I would have been even happier.
At any rate, I highly recommend this book to anybody who is interested in sort of a people's history of Tucson, interested in any of the issues I've mentioned, or if you just want a rollicking adventure story full of drugs, guns, sex, blood, and politics. I guess you could say it's sort of a hybrid of William S. Burroughs or Pynchon, and Howard Zinn or Eduardo Galleano, with a touch of DeLillo and a dash of Edward Abbey. What more could one ask for?
Posted by steev at Enero 17, 2006 11:27 AM