Did You Know…?

Strange, but true. Charles Embree’s A dream of a throne, the story of a Mexican revolt, is based on the story of the Lake Chapala area during the 19^th century.

Embree was born in Princeton, Indiana, October 1, 1874, the son of lawyer David Franklin Embree, member of a prominent pioneer family, and Mary Fleming Embree. He was educated in Princeton public schools and entered Wabash College in the fall of 1892. After three years he left college without graduating to devote himself to writing, and achieved immediate success. His first book, a collections of stories entitled For the Love of Tonita, and other tales of the Mesas was published in 1897. Its success led to two full-length novels.

On January 18, 1898, Embree married Virginia Broadwell. The newlyweds moved to Mexico, and lived in Chapala for eight months in 1898, before moving to Oaxaca. The precise motives behind their decision to spend two years in Mexico remain frustratingly unclear.

Embree’s second book, dedicated to his wife, is set in the Lake Chapala region, but was written while they were in Oaxaca. A Dream of a Throne, the Story of a Mexican Revolt (1900), is illustrated with five black and white drawings by Henry Sandham (1842–1910), a very well-known Canadian illustrator of the time.

While in Oaxaca, Embree also penned a short newspaper piece about the famous American anthropologist Frederick Starr, who was conducting fieldwork there, reprinted as an appendix in Starr’s In Indian Mexico.

Embree’s third book, illustrated by Dan Smith, was A Heart of Flame: the Story of a Master Passion (1901). In addition, he had several short stories published in McClure’s Magazine, between 1902 and (posthumously) 1906.
In 1903, in recognition of the distinguished place he had already achieved among American novelists, Embree was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree by Wabash College.

Embree and his wife moved to Santa Ana, California. Sadly, the couple had not long celebrated the birth of their only daughter Elinor in 1905 when Embree was taken seriously ill. He died on July 3, not yet 31 years old.

It seems a particular tragedy that someone who had produced several books, including work of this magnitude, should have died so terribly young. In his short time in Chapala, Charles Embree had acquired an excellent historical and geographical knowledge of the region at a time when American travelers to the lake were few and far between.

The publishers advertised A Dream of a Throne: the Story of a Mexican Revolt in glowing terms: “A powerful and highly dramatic romance, dealing with a popular Mexican uprising half a century ago. It is a novel of adventure and of war, and its strongly contrasted characters glow with life and realism. The writer’s thorough knowledge of Mexican life gives him a wealth of new material; and the descriptions of scenery at Lake Chapala are vivid, full of color, and alive with mountain air”.

The book is a remarkable achievement for the time, and for an author only twenty-six when the book was published. Set in the mid-19^th century, it is a highly charged, gripping account of love, intrigue and treachery. In the course of the novel, Embree refers to historical events such as the Pie Claim, and to 1846 when “General Taylor crossed the Rio Grande and invaded Mexican territory.”

From a geographical perspective, Embree displays an accurate and astute knowledge of all his lakeside locales. The spelling of all place-names, with the exception of Ajicjic and Tuxcueco, is exactly as it is today. Details of clothing, habits and customs all ring true. Equally, the clear parallels between events in the novel and real, historical events shows that Embree had a considerable knowledge of the region’s 19^th century history. As one small example, the story begins in the shadow of St. Michael’s hill in Chapala in May 1833, amidst fear of an epidemic of smallpox. In real life, the nearby city of Guadalajara suffered a cholera epidemic in the summer of 1833.

By the end, the novel has returned once more to St. Michael’s hill, and concludes by explaining how the cross on the hill’s summit was erected in memory of the book’s hero who had been executed there.

This novel appears to be the first novel written in any language that was completely set at Lake Chapala. Just as importantly, it is one of the earliest descriptions of everyday indigenous life in the region. As Dr. Wolfgang Vogt of the University of Guadalajara has pointed out, even by the 1920s (twenty years after Embree’s novel was published), virtually no-one was observing or writing about this area from an indigenous point of view. Embree’s novel has particular value since it examines the conflicts between Indians and Spaniards.

All the action in the novel takes place on and around Lake Chapala. The major locales are Mezcala Island, Chapala, Ajijic and Tizapan. Without in any way wishing to downplay Embree’s abilities with dialogue, character development and storyline, the following extracts have been chosen to highlight his depictions of landscapes.

The book opens in Chapala:

At nightfall of a day in May, 1833, there was lamentation in a fisher’s hut on the banks of the Mexican lake Chapala. The shadows of St. Michael’s hill, which rises high and rocky out of the town’s centre, had long since fallen across the Chapala plaza. The sun had set in red and gold, and the waves, as the darkness came on, were rising slowly…

. . .

They were riding over a rough trail with cacti and stones about, and here and there a flock of goats. To the right was a seemingly endless chain of mountains, to the left, more distant, rose St. Michael, low and round (behind whose bulk lay Chapala and the water), and the larger head, called Angostura, lying between that town and Ajicjic on the lake’s edge. Between Angostura and the opposite mountain chain the road led, rising to a hill, to whose summit the little army came. They looked down on the lake and, nearer, small irregular fields, scores of them, checkering a level stretch from mountains to water. Out of these, Ajicjic’s church thrust up a single gleaming tower of white. Three o’clock found the troop sweeping into the barren plaza of that fishing village.

To this day Ajicjic can claim no more than some two thousand souls. It has, even yet, no railroad, no stage; rarely has a vehicle been seen in that primitive place other than the awkward oxcart. Its low, unplastered adobe walls stand close together. The streets are alleys of extreme narrowness wherein there is mud when it rains, dust when it is dry, rocks and swine forever. Nigh every alley twists and turns, is for a block no more than a gutter, for another block a public stable for burros. Yet one may find some better quarters. The plaza, though it is only a bare, brown waste, is wide. The open court before the church, though it too is bare and dirty, with lonely, crumbling walls and pillars about it, yet has in its centre a weatherbeaten cross that speaks of service to the Lord.

The troop filled the plaza. It was halted, and the inhabitants of the town, struck with amazement, either shut themselves up or gathered in silence round about. Groups of brown children, absolutely naked, sat down in the dirt, thumbs in mouth, to wonder in comfort. Rodrigo and Bonavidas began the inquiries, prefacing them with jocularly expressed friendship to certain storekeepers and a toss of tequila here and there down a willing throat. Boats? There hadn’t come but one boat to Ajicjic the blessed day. Ajicjic was losing importance in these times. On market days everybody went to the bigger market at Chapala, where the news was dispersed. And this one boat? It had come from Tizapan with a load of wood for the lime burners.

. . .

The town of Tizapan lies at a short distance from the lake. The shore in that region is no such distinctly marked line of beach and rock as it is at Chapala. It is not even always easy to tell where the shore is. Between water and land there is a stretch of marsh for several hundred yards, watery, pierced by the spears of a million reeds that rise thick and green to a height of some feet. Here flock ducks in great numbers. The marsh is flat, bewildering, and dreary. Through its middle a stream, called the Tizapan River, cuts out more than one course, having formed a delta. The main course of this river, not over twenty yards at its widest part, usually much narrower, is navigable for canoas for half a mile to a point where the land is dry and from which the town lies yet another mile distant. The stream being crooked and the curves sharp, the progress from the open lake to the inner landing is usually made by poles. The lake approach to the town could be easily blocked by blocking the river. Only the one course is navigable. Nobody could cross the marshes. This fact was recognized more than a century ago.

The town itself is like the greater part of Mexican towns, narrow and crooked streets with the low houses (joined together) shutting those streets in and making them seem even narrower, and the central plaza of considerable size left vacant. That plaza is today filled with flowers and fruit and contains a bandstand. In former times it was bare. The mountains rise only a little way behind the town, jagged and huge. Before them is a stretch of rolling green fields. The river, coming from the peaks, dashes down through this pastoral scene with a vivacity that has laid bare a rough and rocky bed whereon the water boils till it passes through the town. At the time when the two small armies were approaching Tizapan, much of the summer green was still on field and mountain. The unclouded sun poured his light over an emerald gem of the lake’s border.

Embree, Charles Fleming. 1900. A Dream of a Throne: the Story of a Mexican Revolt.
Available from Amazon Books: Paperback

• Based on chapter 43 of Lake Chapala through the ages; an anthology of travelers’ tales (Sombrero Books, 2008)

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THE DANE CHANDOS BOOKS

COLLECTING BOOKS ABOUT MEXICO?

VILLAGE IN THE SUN
HOUSE IN THE SUN
CANDELARIA’S COOKBOOK
ALL by DANE CHANDOS

These books were written in the early 1940s and VILLAGE IN THE SUN is still considered to be one of the most endearing books written about Mexico to this day. Set in the area of Ajijic, Jalisco, it gives a delightful view of the Mexicans and their culture without criticism and judgment.

The story is a most entertaining month-by-month account of an Englishman weathering his first year in Ajijic. It is written in a time when the road from Chapala to Jocotepec was a muddy trail and steam bed washouts were part of life during the rainy season. Ice was delivered by bus from Guadalajara, dropped off by the side of the road and left in the sun. In the process of building his house, the author gradually absorbs local customs while bonding with a colorful cast of characters.

HOUSE IN THE SUN. Once again Dane Chandos weaves a vivid Mexican tapestry of the same charm, color, humor and veracity that evoked from the readers of his first book, Village in the Sun, such a unanimously rapturous response.. The house which he was building in Ajijic, on Lake Chapala, south of Guadalajara, is now nearing completion and, at the time of which he writes, is converted to a small inn taking a few paying guests.

Here, Dane Chandos unfolds his day-to-day adventures as “Señor of the Inn,” an amateur hotelier who is at the mercy of both his loyal, unpredictable and often maddening servants, and of his equally unpredictable and maddening – though never boring – guests. All this is set forth with tender understanding and captivating wit against the background of the primitive little village which lies “between the lake and the paws of the mountains,” where anything can happen. HOUSE IN THE SUN has more descriptive details about Mexico than the previous book VILLAGE IN THE SUN as Chandos occasionally takes his guests on sightseeing trips such as a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Zapopan and a canoa trip around the lake. He drives to Uruapan and to the still-erupting volcano at Paricutín.

• Review by Alan Cogan
• Pilgrimage – An Excerpt

CANDELARIA’S COOKBOOK. A scruffy folder, faintly typed and badly eaten by mice, was discovered in the bottom drawer of an ancient roll-top desk in a house on Lake Chapala.

It turned out to be a collection of recipes, lovingly transcribed sixty years ago by an English writer, Dane Chandos, from the gnomic utterances of Candelaria, his Mexican cook. It includes such gastronomic triumphs as “Pork Bone that will Spot your Tablecloth” or “Bananas as I Arrange Them for Guests of the Last Minute”, and the “Eggs of a Señora who lived in Tuxcueca but Died.”

Arguably there are more practical cookery books available in print, but none with so much charm. “Do not disturb the Señor,” Candelaria used to tell visitors while the book was being written. “He is making a book. This time it is an important book. It is a book of how to cook.”

Candelaria’s Cookbook, written in both Spanish and English, is a beguiling classic, an eccentric masterpiece with some very unusual recipes and a unique insight into Mexican village life.

• Review by Sophie Annan Jensen

The above three books are delightful and essential reading for anyone who cares about the spirit of Mexico and its people.

All proceeds from the sale of these books go to the village of San Antonio Tlayacapan, to help towards the education of some of the young people of the village.

They may be purchased at:

Copies can be obtained from outside Mexico through Sombrero Books, or in AJIJIC at

• DIANE PEARL
• THE LAKE CHAPALA SOCIETY, 16 de Septiembre # 16A, Ajijic, Jalisco.
• LA NUEVA POSADA, Donato Guerra #9, Ajijic, Jalisco Tel: (376) 6.13.44 o (376) 6.14.44

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Cogan’s Reviews

A Mexico book by Harriet Doerr

Only a sense of duty got me through this boring novel. I know that it comes with all kinds of recommendations and wonderful reviews from all the best sources. Harriet Doerr won the American Book Award in 1984 with her novel “Stones for Ibarra.” And “Consider This…” was a best-seller in its day. Nonetheless, it was 241 pages of chore for this reader.

Just as a matter of interest, I reviewed “Stones for Ibarra” many moons ago. My verdict at that time was: Sentimental and quite lacking in conviction and authenticity.” I can say exactly the same thing about this book. Ms. Doerr just doesn’t have very believable characters to carry her feeble story. They’re like puppets who do and say things when she pulls the strings. But they have no sense of having lives when she isn’t working those cords.

The story takes place “a number of years ago”. That kind of woolly vagueness is Doerr’s hallmark. Later on she does mention a president who is in power at the time and from that I’d place the story around 1964. She’s equally vague on where the story takes place. None of the towns that are mentioned are in my map book of Mexico. The area Doerr’s talking about could even be a version of the Lake Chapala area of decades ago.

The highly improbable plot concerns two characters, Sue and Bud, who come together on a dried up mesa where there’s a lake and a nearby town. Sue is an artist, trying to find herself in Mexico. Bud is on the run from the IRS for non-payment of taxes. The two form a highly unlikely union and purchase ten acres of land in order to set up a business building houses on the slopes overlooking the lake. I simply can’t imagine a more unconvincing beginning for a story and Doerr isn’t very good at persuading us that either the relationship or the business venture would stand a chance of working. I should also add that there isn’t even a hint of any romance between the two.

The story covers a few years in the lives of Sue and Bud. Other characters appear, of course. A few people do buy the houses that Bud builds. Such as the elderly Ursula who seems to have come to Mexico to die. And then there’s Fran, another lady with Mexican connections who wants to build a home in this unlikely place as a way to hang on to her handsome Mexican lover. There are also some locals who move in and out of the plot – the town mayor, a young doctor, maids, gardeners, etc.

The descriptions of places are all so soft and gentle and pretty-pretty and don’t really resemble any kind of Mexico I see when I step outside my door. It comes as a distinct shock when Doerr actually describes something in a negative or realistic way, when, for example, she mentions in passing that the local puebla of Amapolas is “a town of unpaved streets that still lacked drains.” Or when an off-stage character is asked if she’d like to move to Mexico she responds negatively, in shocked tones: “Live in a place where you can’t drink the water, eat the food, understand the exchange or trust the police?” But these are rare instances in a narrative that “limns in lapidary prose a novel of loss and renewal in a small Mexican village,” – as one reviewer describes it.

I shouldn’t make it sound like a total loss. The novel does have its moments. I will admit to being touched by the description of Ursula’s death:

“Our lives are brief beyond our comprehension or our desire, she told herself. We drop like cottonwood leaves from trees after a single frost. The interval between birth and death is scarcely more than a breathing space. Tonight, in her house on a Mexican hill, Ursula Bowles listened to the five assembled in her sala and though she heard the faint rustle of their days slipping by. She could see now that an individual life is, in the end, nothing more than a stirring of air, a shifting of light. No one of us, finally, can be more than that. Even Einstein. Even Brahms. Then the widow slept.

In my humble O: Ms Doerr still lacks conviction and authenticity.

Consider This, Señora
By Harriet Doerr

Harcourt Brace paperback, 1993

Available from Amazon Books: Paperback

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Cogan’s Reviews

A Mexico book by Carlos Fuentes

Here’s Fuentes at it again, publishing short stories and novellas under a single title and trying to interlink them into a cohesive whole as he tried to do in The Crystal Frontier. The connection here is the orange tree, the symbol of Spain. “Could any image verify a Spaniard’s identity better than the sight of a man eating an orange?” asks one of the characters early on in the book. I have to admit that that would never have occurred to me. However, I won’t argue the point. The orange tree appears in each story but doesn’t provide much more than a nice title and some superficial linkage.

The main connection between these five stories is really Fuentes playing – and having whimsical fun – with history. In The Two Shores, for example, he describes how Cortes finds a Spanish sailor who was stranded in Mexico for several years before Cortes’s arrival and who speaks the Indian languages fluently. The joke, however, is that the sailor, Jeronimo de Aguilar, respects the locals and loathes Cortes’s goal of conquest and deliberately mistranslates much of what Cortes says. However, there are conversations between Cortes and Moctezuma that provide possible insights or interpretations of both men, as seen through the eyes of the translator who, of course, is playing his own game.

Further conflict is provided by the presence of a second translator – Cortes’s girl friend La Malinche, who has no qualms about her lover’s dreams of conquest.

In the second story, Sons of the Conquistador, we meet the two sons of Cortes. They’re both named Martin. One is the child of his Spanish wife. The other is the illegitimate son of his Indian mistress. I don’t know if Cortes had two such sons, but that isn’t important to the story. The real point of these tales is to show the many ways in which history can be interpreted, mainly depending on the point of view of the person doing the interpretation.

The story concerns the two sons’ dispute over the disposition of their father’s will. However, for this reader, the most satisfying aspect was finding out that Cortes had so many legal problems after his years of conquest. He was never accepted in his native land and never received the glory he obviously yearned for. The story mentions, for instance: “…expenditures for scribes, scriveners, messengers. More than two hundred royal documents relevant to our father, denying his grievances, putting off his claims, paying him in chilly gall for the blazing gold of the conquest. A world of shyster lawyers, of laws obeyed but never carried out, of ink-stained hands, pyramids of legal briefs, quills plucked to write a thousand legacies – more feathers in the inkwells than geese in the ponds!”

Gee! – it all sounds almost like something that might happen in today’s Washington – and fitting payment, I would say, for the misery Cortes caused during his years of conquest.

In The Two Americas, Fuentes takes us for a huge imaginative romp where he muses that Columbus didn’t really land in the America we all know. Instead, he landed in a kind of Eden where he seemed destined to live forever. At least he lived for 500 years. At the time of his arrival in this paradise he put a message in a bottle. The bottle floated all the way to Japan, where it was discovered 500 years later, by modern-day Japanese entrepreneurs who came looking for him. And because of all their modern mega-bucks Columbus’s Eden underwent massive change.

Columbus muses about it all as follows: “Dazed, I signed the various contracts, including clauses relating to fried chicken and soda water, gas stations, motels, pizzerias, ice cream parlors, picture magazines, cigarettes, tires, supermarkets, cameras, cars, yachts, musical instruments, and a list of etceteras longer than the list of titles belonging to the monarchs of Spain for whom I had embarked on my voyage of discovery.”

The story ends with Columbus returning home – on a jet! “What shall I find when I return to Spain?” he asks himself. “I shall open the door of my home again. I shall plant the orange seed again.”

As you can see, our legs are being thoroughly pulled here as Fuentes has fun with the history we all know and accept.

“Apollo and the Whores” doesn’t quite seem to fit into the overall context of all this historic playfulness but it’s fun. It concerns the exploits of a grade-B movie actor who visits Acapulco and finds himself out at sea with seven prostitutes. What you expect to happen certainly does happen and our boy even dies in the process. The description of the scene in which this occurs must’ve presented an incredible challenge to the translator. You’ll find how he handled it on page 174, by the way.

I mentioned at the start that there are five stories in this volume. However, I found with one of them, “The Two Numantias”, that I was simply getting nothing out of it. So I just gave up. It’s concerned with the Roman conquest of Spain. I confess that, at my ripe old age, I don’t waste time struggling with books. There are just too damn many of them. I remember seeing a t-shirt years ago with the printed motto: “So little time…so much to read.” How could you possibly say it better?

Verdict:

“The Orange Tree” isn’t for everyone. But if you’re looking for a change of pace and if that kind of whimsical playfulness sounds interesting to you, then give it a try.

The Orange Tree
By Carlos Fuentes

Harper Perennial paperback, 1994.

Available from Amazon Books: Hardcover

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Cogan’s Reviews

You would be hard pressed to find a more Mexican novel than this one. Just about all of the action takes place in the state of Coahuila. Twice I found myself interested enough in the setting to refer to my maps to find the towns in the desolate border area McCarthy writes about.

Later, when one of the characters starts to tell the hero, John Grady Cole, about her life with the former Mexican president Francisco Madero, I immediately pulled out my copy of “A History of Mexico” just to see how her story stacked against the historical facts.

I don’t particularly enjoy reading westerns but such is the power of McCarthy’s writing that I was drawn into those small researches simply to enhance my enjoyment of his book.

The action takes place in the 1940’s when the 16 year old Cole and his buddy, Lacey Rawlins, feel they’ve come to the end of their possibilities in Texas and take off on an ill-defined quest across the border into Mexico. They meet up with another runaway, Jimmy Blevins. Blevins is handy with guns, which later gets the trio into serious trouble.

Cole and Rawlins find work on a big hacienda where Cole’s knowledge and feeling for horses makes him a valuable employee. However, trouble starts when he and the daughter of the wealthy hacendado fall in love. He has to pay for that mistake. Also, he is arrested by the police because of his association with Blevins, who has killed a Mexican. Cole and Rawlins spend time in a Mexican jail and are put to a great deal of suffering.

Eventually Cole is released and finds his way back to the hacienda where he is given explanations for some of the bizarre things that have happened to him. Then, having “come of age” he rides back into Texas.

One could read a ton of symbolism into this story, particularly in the passages about horses, and McCarthy’s almost biblical style of writing suggests a striving for deeper significance in what is, on the surface at least, a simple action tale.

The narrative is laden with passages like the following: “He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and it’s beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.” As you can see, it’s not your average Zane Grey.

Actually, there are quite a few passages that stop you in your tracks. My favorite is on page 161, a sentence of some 216 words that doesn’t have a single piece of punctuation in it.

I sound as though I didn’t like “All the Pretty Horses”. Wrong. I loved it. John Grady Cole is a true hero, exhibiting a kind of cowboy code of honor and moral stamina that few people ever exhibit. His determination to see justice done and to find answers to the open questions of his life is truly admirable.

It’s not the easiest novel to get into, but once you catch its rhythm I think you would want to stay with it. Also, be advised that when the characters speak Spanish in this book, they speak Spanish – solamente. If you don’t understand the language you might have a hard time understanding some of the exchanges. If you do, it really enhances the realism of the book. I should add, however, it is possible to find translations of those exchanges. I discovered that there’s a Cormac McCarthy website. (I should’ve known there’d be one. I mean – is this a great time or what?) Anyway, it’s https://www.cormacmcarthy.com/. It’s an interesting place to browse – full of all sorts of collegiate twaddle about the symbolism of the horses and “pre-Oedipal fusion”. McCarthy certainly does have a loyal following. And university literature courses have a lot to answer for.

“All the Pretty Horses” is Volume 1 of what the author calls The Border Trilogy Volume 2, “The Crossing” was published in 1995. I shall read it soon. Volume 3 hasn’t appeared yet.

Not for everybody but powerful stuff for those who do enjoy it.

All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy.

Random House. 1993.

To order from Amazon Books: Paperback, Hard Cover

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Cogan’s Reviews

The sequel to Aztec by Gary Jennings

Readers of these reviews may remember that I was a big fan of Jenning’s previous work, Aztec . I gave it my highest accolade – five stars. And here comes the sequel, which is almost as good.

The action in this one takes place 12 years after all the goings on in Aztec and concerns the adventures of 18 year old Tenamixtli, the son of Mixtli, the hero of the former novel. Indeed, in the first chapter, Tenamixtli witnesses an execution, a burning at the stake being publicly carried out by Spanish troops. Later, he discovers that the executed man was his father. How’s that for getting a story started? As you can imagine, revenge plays a big part in the plot.

It becomes Mixtli’s mission to rid his country of the Spaniards and he sets about the task with great deliberation. He starts by going to Mexico City and learning Spanish.

“Studying the white man’s tongue?” Netzlin said. “Is that why you are here in the city?” I went on to tell him how I intended to learn everything possible about the white man. “So that I can effectively raise a rebellion against them. Drive them out of all the lands of The One World.”

Tenamixtli also recruits a number of people with the same intention. By patiently working with the Spanish conquerers and learning their customs he acquires a great deal of knowledge about his enemies. While serving on a duck hunt, for example, he learns a something about weaponry and discovers how to make gunpowder.

Our hero also visits the northern part of Mexico which has remained unmolested by the Spaniards, at least at the time being written about. There he visits some of the northern tribes to try to recruit warriors.

When he visits Michoacan, which is under Spanish control, he recruits a small army of women warriors. He also meets a Spanish priest, who, somewhat against the will of his own people, is setting out to create a Utopia in that state. He is also trying to teach the locals how to make Spanish guitars!

All these travels and adventures and characters give author Jennings wonderful opportunities to exhibit his enormous research about the customs, religions and ways of life of these people. He also depicts extremely well throughout what it must be like to live in a conquered and subjugated country.

As in the previous book there’s the usual frequent use of Aztec vocabulary and the usual tongue-twisting pronunciations to wrestle with. Indeed, it’s occasionally overdone. For example, in one exchange a character says to another: “Are you tlahuele, friend, or merely xolopitli?” What he’s really asking is: Are you stark raving mad or are you just acting silly?” And as all the other things these characters say are written in plain English, one wonders why that particular question couldn’t be written in plain English, rather than holding up the narrative to explain what was just said. There’s an overabundance of such exchanges, both in Aztec and Spanish. However, on the positive side, the foreign words do lend something to the feeling of reality of the overall narrative. I suspect the author would defend those passages on those grounds.

There’s also an interesting sex scene where our boy loses his virginity. I find I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for sex scenes but it at least gave me the opportunity to learn a bunch of new naughty words, like xacapili, tepuli, tipili, omicetl, and cuilontli. If that turns you on, it’s on page 119.

The last two hundred pages of Aztec Autumn are great fun, with stories of sieges, battles, guerrilla warfare – complete with lots of treachery, heroism and cruelty. In one scene 138 prisoners of war are each given the choice of their method of execution. And although the story naturally conforms with history – i.e. the Aztecs don’t win – it’s still satisfying.

Verdict: Good stuff. One for the shopping cart.

Aztec Autumn
By Gary Jennings

Tor Paperback, 1997

Available from Amazon Books: Paperback – Hardcover

 Published or Updated on: January 1, 1999 by Alan Cogan © 1999

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Cogan’s Reviews

A Mexico book by Robert James Waller

Here’s a rather odd novel from the author of “The Bridges of Madison Country” and “Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend”. I’ve always thought of Waller as a writer of romances, going only by the titles of his books, never having read any of them. This one, however, is a quite suspenseful “chase” story – complete with a rather bloody ending – as well as being a travelogue of at least one area of Mexico.

The two leading characters are rather unlikely people to be involved in such a tale. And the one who is the cause of all their problems is the unlikeliest of all. He’s a paid assassin, with many “kills” to his credit. And – oh, yes – his employer is the United States government.

Anyway, the story begins in Puerto Vallarta with our hero, Danny Pastor, a minor novelist, down on his luck and looking for a subject for his next book. He and his Mexican girlfriend, Luz Maria, are in a bar one evening when a shooting takes place outside in the street. By chance, Danny is the only person who actually sees the shooter at work. It’s an assassination and two U.S. government officials are the victims.

Danny and Luz escape the scene immediately. Danny doesn’t want to get involved in all the questioning that he knows will ensue as hordes of policemen descend on the scene. Nor does he want it known that he saw the shooter. He and Luz go to another bar and, lo and behold, the shooter is there. A conversation takes place. Danny is all the time wondering how he can make some literary hay out of what he has witnessed. Anyway, with this in mind, he ends up agreeing to take the shooter up to the border. And so Danny, Luz and the assassin set out in Danny’s beat up old truck on the two or three day journey to the north.

Out of this quite improbable beginning our chase begins. I say chase because U.S. officials quickly arrive on the scene and organize the pursuit. One of them, a CIA official knows the shooter’s identity and knows they have a formidable adversary. His reasons for knowing the shooter’s identity are a part of the very complicated plot. The shooter’s name is Clayton Price. He has done fantastic work with the army where he was a sniper in Vietnam and, later, other assassination assignments for the CIA in various parts of the world. In his younger days he outshot twenty-six hundred other marksmen at the National High Power Rifle Championships, shooting at a pinhead target a thousand yards away. Reading about his “career” was the best part of the story for me.

Mexican police are alerted all across the country as our unlikely threesome drive north. Naturally, there are some incidents along the way. I should also say that this is a story that sent me to the map a couple of times, just to check on exactly where the action was taking place.

We find out a great deal about the assassin en route. We discover the reason for the assassinations and why he is now considered a “rogue” by his former employers in the CIA. We even sympathize with him, even though he is a dangerous person to be around. He’s also a rather complicated s.o.b. While it’s true he has murdered a large number of people he’s not completely unattractive. He rather shyly admits to Luz at one stage that he has never danced with a woman in his life. At times he’s even given to small poetic flights of fancy and we can well understand when Luz falls for him. Dammit! – we even get to like him a little bit.

Anyway, that’s as much of the plot of this rather complex little tale that I’m going to give you.

You’ll have to find out the rest for yourself.

VERDICT: A pretty good page-turner. Waller is quite an elegant writer, even for a story such as this. You won’t learn an awful lot about Mexico but it’s a fun read.

Puerto Vallarta Squeeze
By Robert James Waller

Warner Books, 1995, 210 pages

Available from Amazon Books: Paperback

The post Puerto Vallarta Squeeze appeared first on MexConnect.

Cogan’s Reviews

If one were to believe that this is really a novel in nine stories, as the author and publisher claim, then one would have to say it was a failure. It simply isn’t a novel. And stringing some short stories together doesn’t make it a novel either, just because a few of them happen to share the same characters. However, having got that off my chest, I would like to say that, despite these structural flaws, I found The Crystal Frontier totally absorbing. I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone who seriously wants to know more about Mexico and Mexicans.

The book consists of nine short narratives – stories, if you like – each one occurring in the hazy borderline between Mexico and America – what Fuentes chooses to call the crystal frontier. I say hazy borderline because only one of these stories is about the actual geographical border. One, for example, takes place on the fortieth floor of a New York skyscraper where a Mexican laborer and a New York career woman meet briefly. Another takes place in Ithica, N.Y., where a young Mexican medical student lives with a local family. Yet another takes place in one of the American factories south of the border where Mexicans toil for a fraction of the pay that an American worker would earn.

What Fuentes is saying is that the frontier between the two countries has become fluid, more interlocking and over-lapping as more and more Mexicans go, legally or illegally, to the U.S. and as more Americans establish contacts with Mexico. The border between the two cultures is now almost anywhere in time and space. The author has enormous fun exploring the situations that result. The stories themselves are often unwieldy and shapeless. However, what saves them is the sheer narrative force which Fuentes brings to them. He writes with enormous exuberance and passion. His frequent angry rants are what make this such an interesting read.

I don’t recall who coined the expression: “Alas, poor Mexico. So far from God. So close to the United States.” It might even have been Fuentes himself. In any event, all the stories in this collection revolve around that theme. In fact, he even does some improvising on the basic theme at the end of the book, with: “Poor Mexico, poor United States, so far from God, so near to each other.”

Most of the time he speaks through his characters, although there’s no mistaking who is really speaking. Here, for example, are the inner musings of a racist Border Patrol agent: “It was necessary to save the southern border. The enemy was entering through there. Today the nation was being protected there, just as it was at Pearl Harbor or on the Normandy beaches. It was all the same. There they were, provoking him indecently, grouped up on the Mexican side, showing their arms open in a cross, clenching their fists, saying to the other side: You need us. We come to the border because without us your crops would rot. There is no one to harvest them, there is no one to help in hospitals, take care of children, serve in restaurants unless we lend you our arms. It was a challenge, and Dan’s wife told him so with a brutal joke: ‘Listen, I need a nanny for the kid. Don’t tell me you’re going to turn Josefina in? Don’t be stubborn. The more workers that enter, the safer your job is, buster…'”

And here are the thoughts of a young Mexican woman in Ciudad Juárez about her country: “She was ambitious, disciplined, and what did it get her? Stuck there on the border…eager to leave Mexico every night, bored crossing over to Juárez every morning past iron skeletons, cemetaries of skyscrapers left half-built because of Mexico’s repeated bad luck: money’s all used up, the crisis has arrived, they’ve locked up the investor, the government functionary, the top dog, but not even then does the corruption stop, fucked-up country, screwed country, desperate country like a rat running on a wheel, deluding itself into thinking it’s going somewhere but never moving an inch.”

And it’s not only Mexican official corruption that comes in for criticism from Fuentes. For example, an American student explains a few facts of life to a visiting Mexican:

“Do you know what your landlord, Mr. Tarleton Wingate, does for a living? He inflates the budgets of companies doing business with the Pentagon. Do you know how much Mr. Wingate charges the air force for lavatories for its planes? Two hundred thousand dollars each. Almost a quarter of a million dollars so someone can shit comfortably in midair! Who pays the expenses of the Defense Department and the earnings of Mr. Wingate? I do. The taxpayer…Just ask Mr. Wingate if he wants the government to stop defense spending, stop saving failed banks, or stop subsidizing inefficient farmers. Ask him and see what he says. They’re a bunch of cynics. They want free enterprise in everything, except when it comes to weapons and rescuing thieving financiers.”

But it’s not all heavy political going. “Spoils” is a wonderful story about food in which the hero, Dionisio Rangel, expounds on the five great cuisines of the world – Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish and Mexican. And he gives lots of mouth-watering reasons why Mexican is up there with the best. He rates American cuisine among the worst, by the way. He has much to say about the 40 million obese Americans and their fast food diets. There’s a marvellous passage – too long to quote here – where he sits outside places like Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken in California and makes observations about the people going in and out.

In the story, “Pain”, young Juan Zamora wins a scholarship to study medicine at Cornell University. He is from a respectable but not very wealthy family in Mexico City. His late father was honest and missed many opportunities to enrich himself. Juan keeps up appearances and goes to school in suits and polished shoes while his American fellow students show up in torn jeans, their caps worn backwards. Juan recognizes that this is an American way of trying to erase class differences, in appearance at least. The well-to-do family he stays with are impressed with his appearance and imagine his family as wealthy hacienda owners back in Mexico.

“Charlotte, his “landlady”, was the first platinum-dyed white woman Juan Zamora had ever seen wearing an apron,” writes Fuentes. “How polite Spanish aristocrats are!” she would say. Charlotte never called Juan Zamora Mexican. She was afraid of offending him.

The story is full of neat little snobberies and class distinctions – all of which are put to even greater tests when Juan discovers he is gay and again, later, when the American family plan a surprise visit to his humble home in Mexico City.

Because Fuentes knows both countries so intimately everything he writes has complete authority. His knowledge of American idioms and folkways is perfect. What other Mexican author can make casual passing references to Beavis and Butt-head, Forrest Gump, Cathy Lee Crosby and Wayne’s World and get it all absolutely right?

The Crystal Frontier – A novel in nine stories
By Carlos Fuentes

Farrar Straus Giroux 1997

Available from Amazon Books: Hardcover

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Cogan’s Reviews

It’s a long time since I started to read a book with such high hopes. And I don’t think I’ve ever put one down, unfinished, with such a feeling of disappointment.

Why the optimism? Well, I’m sure everyone knows that Laura Esquivel is the author of the very successful “Like Water For Chocolate”, which became an even more successful movie. The novel sold 3 million copies in 30 languages. The movie won 11 awards. So I picked up her second novel in its paperback edition and, at first glance, found it a most attractive package. It comes with a compact disk which contains about 39 minutes of operatic arias and some Mexican pop music, which is meant to accompany parts of the text. It even has half a dozen sections of rather dramatic artwork by Miguelanxo Prado, Spain’s foremost graphic artist. And it makes generous use of poetry, with a poem at the start of each chapter. I particularly liked the samples from Trece Poetas del Mundo Azteca. At first blush the complete package looks like a winner…..and all for $16 U.S.

Anyway, even though the story starts out calmly enough, by the time you reach chapter two, you’re in the middle of the wildest kind of fantasy, part new age and part sci-fi, complete with time travel, space travel, reincarnation, astrology and almost anything else you can imagine. The time span of the book stretches from the fall of Moctezuma to the 23rd century. The setting is Mexico City… or then again it might be The Garden of Eden or the planet Korma. The characters may be actual people…or they may be guardian angels, or demons. Or they may be someone who is going through her 14,000th reincarnation. The men may have been women earlier in the story, or women who used to be men. And, of course, there’s plenty of futuristic technology….like televirtuals (which plonk you right into the middle of ongoing events), photomental cameras, soul transplants (in case you REALLY want to change your identity), auraphotos, and so on.

Here’s what the web site has to say about the plot: “It’s a story of a passion that survives from Moctezuma’s empire to the 23rd century. Azucena is an “astroanalyst”, a sort of highly evolved psychotherapist, who ministers to the karmically challenged. As an enlightened soul, Azucena has finally caught the brass ring of reincarnation: she is allowed to meet her twin soul, her true love, Rodrigo. But after one night of supreme passion, the lovers are separated, and Azucena must search for Rodrigo across the galaxy and through 14,000 lives.”

No matter how much I might try, I couldn’t put it more succinctly than that.

At about the halfway point, when I was thoroughly confused and growing rather irritable with all these goings on, I took the coward’s way out and went into Amazon.com to see what the customers of my favorite bookstore were saying about all of this. It was a rather interesting visit. There are seven pages of reviews in there -more than I can ever recall seeing for any other book. Also, all the opinions are expressed in the most extreme terms.

On one hand, you have: “…romantic”, innovative, and wildly comic”. “A great book, not to be missed.” “Wonderful, wonderful!” “Explores love and humanity at the deepest level.” “A humorous look at the meaning of life.” “A multi-media experience of love.”

On the other hand you have: “A strain to finish”, “The author doesn’t care, so why should we?” “One of the worst books I’ve ever read.” “Sadly disappointing.” “A drag.” “Drivel.” “It stinks.” “Overly self conscious…hollow.” (Actually, I’m rather impressed with Amazon.com for publishing that many negative reviews.)

Okay…after all that…where does a karmically challenged reviewer like me stand? Well, I guess I have to say I’m a helluva lot closer to the “drivel” group than the “wonderful, wonderful!” people. I’m disappointed more than anything. Laura Esquivel can really write and she has an exuberant sense of humor and she looks lovely in the back cover photo. And I hate to say negative things about a lovely lady. I liked the first chapter, before she zoomed off into outer space and the sixth dimension. In it she was talking about two women in love with the same man. The man is Rodrigo, one of Cortes’s lieutenants. The women are Isabel, his Spanish wife and Citlali, his Aztec mistress, who is also the housemaid. Here’s how Esquivel describes relations between the two women.

“For a meeting to take place, two people must come together in the same space, but neither of these women inhabited the same house. Isabel continued to live in Spain, Citlali in Tenochtitlán. They had no way of ever meeting, much less communicating, for they did not speak the same language. Neither of them could recognize herself in the eyes of the other. They walked on the same paths, were warmed by the same sun, were awakened by the same birds, were caressed by the same hands and kissed by the same lips; yet they found not a single point of contact…”

What a pity someone who can write like that should squander her talents so wildly. When you write, you need discipline… perhaps even more so when you write science-fiction or new age, or when you try (heaven forbid!) to put The Celestine Prophecy into fictional form, which is what one of those Amazon.com reviewers thought was happening. It’s hard to find much sense of discipline in this book.

I liked the many pages of artwork, but they didn’t really match the story line. For me, the illustrations had a dated look to them, as though they were depicting past events, which worked against all that futuristic skittering back and forth through time and space. But the poems were nice, especially the samples from Trece Poetas del Mundo Azteca.

The CD is pleasant listening, but it’s very much of this day and age. You can easily find the same music on hundreds of radio stations. However, and, even though I know I’ll never read the book again, I’m quite happy to add the CD to my collection.

I’m not completely ready to give up on Laura Esquivel yet. However, next time I won’t shell out the $16 until after I’ve read the reviews in Amazon.com and elsewhere.

Verdict: Approach with extreme caution.
Available from Amazon Books: Paperback

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Cogan’s Reviews

My spies tell me that author Scofield used to live in Ajijic and that Lago de Luz, the setting for her novel, is in fact Ajijic. If so, here’s her description of the village:

“Lago de Luz, on the altiplano far from the sea, where it is neither hot nor cold, boasts no buildings higher than two stories, and no slick discos. It is rather a sleepy place, swollen on weekends when musicians and vendors make the plaza festive for the tourists in from the nearby city. Resident Americans and Canadians make their own social life in their suburban enclaves and trailer parks, their apartments and houses, halls and meeting rooms. The Lakeside Society is the hub of activity, the place where everyone crosses, but there are many diversions: Elk Clubs, Rotarians, Veterans Clubs, Red Cross and all the interest groups, for cards and dominoes and self-improvement. “

Three or four years after that was written one could certainly quibble with the word “sleepy” to describe present-day Ajijic. One would have to also include the sound of real estate salesmen’s pitches, cement trucks and jackhammers to complete the picture. But it’s still not a bad summary of the way many people live their lives here, even today, even after all the developers have invaded the place.

The story is about Tom Riley whose wife has died and left him “out of balance”. He returns to Mexico, the place where he and his wife spent their honeymoon. He meets an expatriate American writer who also has a painful past. She, the narrator of the story, tries to get Tom to start changing his life, rewriting his story.

He also meets Consolata, a small restaurant owner, and her lovely daughter Divina. Tom and Divina fall in love. Which is how he begins changing the plot of his life. And of course the two eventually marry. Of such simple, straightforward stuff is this story made.

If I have reservations with this book it is that the Mexicans all seem so wise and noble, especially Consolata who is given to saying things like, ” God gives us ideas like seeds. He means us to use them;” or: ” You are looking at your life with one eye closed, with your hands clasped like a monk.” There’s a mild attempt on the author’s part to suggest Consolata has magical powers, or at least knows everything that goes on. But it doesn’t really go anywhere.

There’s a fiesta at the end of the story where Riley is dancing with Divina and we read the following: ” He danced. He tried to imagine they were cast in a movie from the forties.” And that’s my problem with this story. I found it more than coincidental to come upon that sentence because I was thinking just the same thing. There’s an occasional striving to be pretty and picturesque and the occasional scene – the fiesta, for instance – comes across like a scene from a Hollywood musical about Mexico.

When I read a book now I invariably look in amazon.com to see what other people are saying about it. One often comes up with an insight or two. In this case, I found a quote from the author:

“I wrote this fanciful tale of love at a time when I needed to believe that there was light at the end of the dark night. So I used that very metaphor to construct a story of a good man who thinks he is too timid to make a new life after his wife’s death. I wove spirituality, passion, affection for village life into a story in which, like a folk tale, everyone plays out fate and finds happiness.”

I think the first sentence of that quote is the key to this novel. It has the feel of a deeply personal story, perhaps a healing process for the author herself, rather than being a merely concocted tale.

If you’re looking for action, plot, suspense and all those things that make you burn the midnight oil, this isn’t for you. If you enjoy a quiet, reflective exploration of another person’s life, by all means, take a look at this book.

A Chance To See Egypt
By Sandra Scofield

1996, Cliff Street Books

Available from Amazon Books: Paperback — Hardcover

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