I guess this was my subconscious way of going to New Orleans, since I’m missing MLA this year. This is a strange little novel — it’s a really cool invocation of place (19C NOLA), but not via sensory detail. It’s more like someone arriving to a new place and looking around and noticing all the crazy things happening (maybe you’ve also seen that video clip?) — a collection of surprising incidents viewed from without, lacking context. This is interestingly mirrored in the representation of the central protagonist, Benito Juárez: we are also seeing him from the outside, watching this odd transitional moment of his life. But you’ll have to go to Wikipedia to understand the bigger picture: this novel isn’t going to walk you through it. So instead, the book is a kind of brief, roughly sketched speculation. It’s somewhat vague (though engaging) — what really came through for me was the sense of hemispheric, even global history; the absurdity of limiting your sense of American history to what happened in the mainland states, rather than seeing it as part of a bustling transatlantic ecology.
I was tempted to say that it’s an uncharacteristic style for Herrera, but then I realized that I’d be hard pressed to characterize his style in any one way. Each of his books is so strikingly different from the others, and so cool. One of the more surprising, and intriguing, writers working today.
Kasia Reads 