LITERATURE

Celebrate San Miguel’s new anthology
By Eva Hunter


Literary Event
Solamente en San Miguel
Fri, Oct 26, 7pm
Posada de San Francisco
Corner of Hidalgo & San Francisco
50 pesos, includes wine reception

It’s touching, it’s funny, its informative, it’s captivating. It will make you adore San Miguel even more than you do now. It will teach you things you never knew, and acquaint you with characters you’ll wish you had known.

San Miguel has long been a haven for writers and finally, some of them are collected in one volume. The 35 selections include essays, fiction, memoirs and poetry—all about San Miguel. The San Miguel Authors’ Sala proudly debuts its new anthology, Solamente en San Miguel, at a publication party on October 26.

In the tradition of the Harry Potter phenomenon, you won’t be able to purchase your copy until the party begins at 7pm. Some of the contributing authors are bringing their favorite appetizers and will be reading selections from their works.

The idea of an Authors’ Sala anthology was conceived almost two years ago and materialized through the imaginative leadership of project coordinator, Meg Matlach.

Loving San Miguel: A review of Solamente in San Miguel
By Gerry Camp

Many readers, both in San Miguel and elsewhere, want to know about living as an expatriate in “our” city. There are those, obviously, who have moved here recently or are contemplating such a move. There also are those in other parts of the world who read about our city in travel magazines and in books about living abroad, and would like some insight into why San Miguel is so often mentioned and so highly praised.

There are books one can read about what it is like to live here. Tony Cohan published On Mexican Time in 2000, a book which one finds in bookstores next to Under the Tuscan Sun, Gringos in Paradise, and A Year in Provence—books about the trials and pleasures of moving to a foreign culture. And for those who can’t resist being here for a stay of a few months that may stretch into years, there are books about the requirements of daily life—where to eat, how to find a doctor, how to deal with the telephone company. To this library of must-have books for the curious and the potential resident, San Miguel Authors’ Sala has just published a different sort of book about life in San Miguel.

Solamente en San Miguel is unique in at least three regards. First, it illustrates life here from many perspectives rather than a single view. There are pieces by 26 transplanted Norteamericanos, and seven pieces by Mexican authors, printed in both Spanish and English. All but one of these Mexican authors has also come to San Miguel from elsewhere.

The second characteristic which makes reading this book about the experience of San Miguel unique is the variety of forms. We are told of life here in fiction and poetry as well as in essays describing the authors’ personal experiences here.

The most significant difference between this book and other San Miguel books, however, is that most of the pieces in this book show what living in San Miguel feels like on a daily basis from the perspective of those who have chosen to make this city their home. People for whom this book will be most meaningful are not people who come to San Miguel to live among other expatriates in gated enclaves, not feeling a need to learn any Spanish other than the phrases of casual encounters with storekeepers and taxi drivers. This is a book for people who might choose to become part of this community, to learn to communicate, to make Mexican friends, to recognize, in one of the “Gringo Haikus” of Lulu Torbet and Leah Feldon, “Juan, Lupe, Miguel, / Jesus, Maria, Jose. / Good saints and neighbors.” 

Many of the pieces are about gringos becoming friends with Mexicans. Vicki Gundrum tells about her friendship with Lupe, the proprietor of the cheese shop below the apartment she rented when she first came to San Miguel. By the end of the story she wants to adopt Lupe so Lupe can get papers to move with Vicki to the US. Kimberly Kinzer’s poem “Muchas Gracias, Diana” introduces us to the delightful little girl next door who “welcomes me / opening the door to her world,” who “does not care that my Spanish is feo.”

In “Weary Blues,” Wayne Greenhaw tells the heartbreaking story of an 18-year-old poet from Alabama who befriends a tiny 14-year-old girl whose family in the campo had sent her to San Miguel to prostitute herself to help support the family. Although the story is fiction, it is perhaps revealing to note that Greenhaw first came to San Miguel at age 18 from Alabama.

Lucina Kathmann, in “Maru’s Door,” writes about the efforts she and her partner, Charles Kuschinski, made to repair the door of her Mexican neighbor’s house. Kuschinski writes in “Marrano Godfather” about his becoming the godfather (though he was not even a Catholic) of two children of the same Maru. In the author’s notes we learn that Kathmann and Kuschinski became the adoptive parents of Maru’s six children when Maru died in childbirth.

Other pieces also deal with friendship that leads to adoption. Wim Coleman and his wife Pat Perrin write about their decision to adopt the daughter of a Mexican child who gave birth at age 15, the child’s father “Desconocido—Unknown.” Belden Butterfield, in his fiction “The Rosary,” writes of a family who adopts the child of their maid. The child, in reality, is their granddaughter, whose father, their son, raped the maid and was later killed during military service in Panama. The return of the daughter, by then a Yale student, to her real mother and Mexican family in San Miguel el Viejo climaxes the story.

Other pieces in the book are more factual, not so saturated with emotion. Edward Simpson, in “Los Concheros,” tells us about the Indian dancers we see in front of the Parroquia in March and September. Diana Walta Hart interviews Beatriz, a 55-year-old widow who lives a happy life working in a “Feed the Hungry” kitchen at an elementary school. Mark Saunders, in “Yes, We Have No Chihuahuas,” humorously indexes the dogs of San Miguel, and Cherie Magnus reports in all seriousness on the contributions of Mexican and American women to the town in “The Amazons of San Miguel.”

In a charming piece of fiction, Ruth Hayward tells the hilarious story of Eduardo, who loses his virginity on his fifteenth birthday to one of the girls in “La Casa de La Turca,” and then has to report the event in confession to a very knowing priest.

The pieces in Spanish and English by Mexican writers are particularly fascinating (in addition to being excellent Spanish lessons). In “El Guerrero Victorioso” (“The Victorious Warrior”) Maria Luisa Moreno recreates the first Alborada (San Miguel Day) from the point of view of San Miguel himself, no less! Two pieces tell of the creation of Parque Benito Juárez, “Recordando” (“Remembering”) by Maria Luisa Rullan and “El Senor de la Luna” (“The Man in the Moon”) by Jesus Hernandez Flores. A bonus in Flores’s story is learning about Dr. Hernández Macías, the author’s great uncle. Everyone in town knows his name, but how many know that he was the town’s doctor, frequently treating people for no more compensation than their thanks, or that he was the municipal president of San Miguel, responsible for building the park? 

The only piece in the book by a true native, aptly titled “Nacida en San Miguel,” shows author Mercedes Arteaga growing up in San Miguel in the seventies, enjoying both Mexican friends and Americanos. Arteaga grew up in a middle-class family; her parents opened the first restaurant in San Miguel. In contrast, Maruja Gonzales, in “Diario de la Deseperanza” (“Diary of Despair”), shows a poor San Miguel family whose house disintegrates around them more each rainy season.

Those of us who love San Miguel must be grateful for the passion and care put into this book by the Authors’ Sala and editor Chris DiMarco. There are many other wonderful pieces I have not mentioned. This is a book to send to people who have never been to San Miguel, but who ask, “Why would someone want to move to Mexico? What do you do there?” It is a book that those who live here will devour in a single day, smiling with recognition at every page. Most of all, it is a book filled with love—love of a people and love of a place perhaps unique in all the world, a place a foreigner can come to and immediately know that he or she has come home. Or in the words of another “Gringo Haiku” by Torbet and Feldon, “This place where fireworks / are prayers to heaven must surely / be heaven on earth.”

Book Fever
Taking the pulse of Philip Roth
By Marcia Loy

Philip Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey. His first book made a splash—a short novel called Goodbye, Columbus, published in 1959 with five short stories. I hadn’t read anything of his since The Ghost Writer in 1979, didn’t know he was still writing, wasn’t sure he was alive. Early in 2006, The New York Times asked 200 writers, critics and editors to list the best novel of the past 25 years. When six of the 21 books that received multiple votes were by Roth, I thought I should have a look. He’s won numerous literary prizes and received the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002. 

I started with his 1998 novel, American Pastoral, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, and which features one of the most sympathetic characters in contemporary literature: Seymour “Swede” Levov. Roth’s prose sent my temperature soaring; his ability to move a story forward impressed me. I was hooked.

Excerpt: The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual postimmigrant struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman farmer’s castle of our super-ordinary Swede. A guy stacked like a deck of cards for things to unfold entirely differently. In no way prepared for what is going to hit him. How could he, with all his carefully calibrated goodness, have known that the stakes of living obediently were so high? Obedience is embraced to lower the stakes. A beautiful wife. A beautiful house. Runs his business like a charm… This is how successful people live. They’re good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them. There are problems, they adjust. Then everything changes and it becomes impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then? Here is someone not set up for life’s 
working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man’s tragedy.

Roth has published four novels in the twenty-first century. All of them are in the Biblioteca.

The Human Stain, 2000, is one of six by Roth named to the Best Book of the Last 25 Years list in The New York Times article. It’s the story of Silk Coleman, classics professor at Athena College, accused of being a racist. We learn in the first paragraph of the book that, at the age of seventy-one, he’s having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman.

Excerpt: “That’s what comes of being hand-raised,” said Faunia “That’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain,” she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even with sadness. That’s how it is—in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was telling the girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark...”

The Plot Against America, 2004, also received multiple nominations in The New York Times poll. The novel starts in 1940, with war raging in Europe. Charles A. Lindbergh is running against Franklin D. Roosevelt in that year’s presidential election under the slogan “Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War.”

Excerpt (speaking of his father): I knew it was a hard life because when he got home in the morning he’d have a drink. Ordinarily in our house a bottle of Four Roses lasted for years. My mother, a caricature of a teetotaler, couldn’t stand the look of a foaming glass of beer, let alone the smell of straight whiskey, and when did my father ever take a drink, other than on their anniversary or when his boss came for dinner, and he served him Four Roses on the rocks? But now he would get home from the market and, before he changed out of his dirty clothes and took his shower, he’d pour the whiskey into a shot glass, tilt back his head, and take it down in one gulp, making the face of a man who’d just bit into a light bulb. “Good!” he’d say aloud. “Good!” Only then could he ease up enough to eat a full meal without getting indigestion.

Everyman, 2006. Roth’s nameless man confronts death starting in his childhood and continuing into his old age. I didn’t think this novel was up to Roth’s usual standards; however, second-rate Roth is better than many first-rate books by other writers. 

The book opens with people throwing dirt on a grave. Then came the sons, men in their late forties and looking, with their glossy black hair and their eloquent dark eyes and the sensual fullness of their wide, identical mouths... Handsome men beginning to grow beefy and seemingly as closely linked with each other as they’d been irreconcilably alienated from the dead father. The younger, Lonny, stepped up to the grave first. But once he’d taken a clod of dirt in his hand, his entire body began to tremble and quake, and … he was overcome with a feeling for his father that wasn’t antagonism but that his antagonism denied him the means to release. When he opened his mouth, nothing emerged except a series of grotesque gasps…He was in so desperate a state that Randy, the older, more decisive son, the scolding son, came instantly to his rescue. He took the clod of dirt from the hand of the younger one and tossed it onto the casket for both of them. And he readily met with success when he went to speak. “Sleep easy, Pop,” Randy said, but any note of tenderness, grief, love or loss was terrifyingly absent from his voice.

Exit Ghost, 2007. I was delighted and relieved to find Roth has again written a first-rate book. This is another in a series about writer Nathan Zuckerman, and here he takes center-stage, returning to New York City from rural New England at the age of 71 to undergo a procedure he hopes will reverse the incontinence he suffered after prostate surgery.

Excerpt: I’d been alone these past eleven years in a small house on a dirt road in the deep country, having decided to live apart like that some two years before the cancer was diagnosed. I see few people…I don’t go to dinner parties, I don’t go to movies, I don’t watch television, I don’t own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or computer. I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is.

Next week Book Fever looks at the twenty-first-century novels others in San Miguel are reading. If you’d like to contribute, please email me at marciabookfever@hotmail.com. Send the title, author, date of publication and a brief quote from the book.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.