FuschiaReads.

Carlos Fuentes
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux 2000 HB 520pp

Wow – what a book!
Laura Diaz is the heroine of this epic tome – her parents, life, marriage, love and death – growing up and old in Mexico during a turbulent century that saw more than one member of her family killed by the Government. Laura and those characters – including the wonderful Frida Kahlo - that surround her in this densely populated novel are rich and complex, flawed and often unredeemed. That marvellous ‘South American’ style of writing - the words more like poetry than prose, so descriptive and evocative, so very very sexy – the sights and sounds – and the cooking, mmmm the cooking….

”rice, beans, plantain, and pork, shredding the meat and adding lemon juice for the dish called ropa vieja, “old clothes”, marinating octopus in its ink, and reserving for the end the meringues, the custards, the jocoques of clotted creama nd the tocino del cielo – the sweetest sweet in the world, which had gone from Barcelona to Havana and from Cuba to Veracruz as if to stifle with sweetness all the bitterness of those lands of revolution, conquest, and tyranny…”

There is a great deal of political commentary – for all her life Laura is involved in ‘movements’- she marries a union activist, her lover and his friends are fleeing from the Spanish Civil War, later friends are victims of McCarthyism. The political turmoil of Mexico constantly in the background – which to my unlearned ears makes me even more glad that however much I disagree with those currently in power atleast they got there without bloodshed. And forget those ‘family’ picnics protesting IR changes, think murders and corruption and great rolling waves of protest and unrest that make no distinction between ‘good people’ and ‘bad people’.

It is not a book to browse, or read while distracted or filling in time. It is a book to saviour; language rich enought to swim in – kept me warm on these wintery nights.

An education.
A joy.