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Martí and more
Francisco Goldman’s Central America
BY RICHARD C. WALLS

Francisco Goldman’s third novel is a long and episodic historical fiction mixing real people, most notably Cuban poet and journalist José Martí, with fictitious (and some semi-fictitious) ones, centrally the story’s beleaguered heroine, María de las Nieves Moran. Although it’s a novel of exacting details and smaller histories swirling inside larger ones, it can also be parallel-universe vague: dates are rarely specified, though most of the book takes place in the 1870s and ’80s, and though much of the action is set in Guatemala, neither the country nor its capital is ever mentioned by name. (Goldman assumes that you have a basic knowledge of the area’s history or have at least read a few reviews before picking up the book.)

María is a "skinny cinnamon-colored mestiza" (person of mixed blood) raised in the jungle before being rescued at the age of six by the prominent Guatemalan Juan Aparicio and raised as the companion of his daughter Paquita. When Paquita is sent to a convent by her father in order to protect her from the advances of a revolutionary general known as El Antichristo (his designs on the young girl began when she was 11 and he was nearly 40), her young friend accompanies her. There, María’s natural intelligence, incipient sensuality, and self-dramatizing flair all flower once she decides to become a nun, ostensibly to protest Paquita’s lack of determination in fending off El Antichristo. An incessant reader and dedicated sufferer, she allays her physical deprivation by developing an addiction to sneezing, ravaging her nose like a wanton cokehead while surrounded by decrepit authority figures intent on propagating the last remnants of wretched mediævalism. As his previous novel, The Ordinary Seaman, amply attested, Goldman has a talent for depicting arduousness, and the María-in-a-nunnery sequence is grimly fascinating.

After this prolonged and focused opening, the novel begins to time-trip. Paquita marries El Antichristo, who becomes the country’s dictator and, before being killed, closes the nunneries. María and Paquita, who’s now a sort of 19th-century Imelda Marcos, are reconciled and go to New York, where Paquita has property — or at least they get on the boat where, once they settle in, we’re treated to an endless display of flashbacks that fill in story gaps and create new ones to be filled later, as well as few flash-forwards for good measure.

Goldman spent seven years writing this book, and there are times when the accumulated research begins to overwhelm the story. The knowledgeable asides about ballooning, photography, condom making, the origin of Vaseline, etc., add to the novel’s picturesque aspect, and Goldman has the style to avoid rendering all this information in a dry manner. But after the convent episode, the story loses all momentum, becoming a series of variable set pieces, the best being those that describe the trials and tribulations of Mack Chinchilla, one of María’s suitors and a man worthy of starring in his own novel. José Martí in particular seems to be perpetually waiting in the wings, and he’s something of disappointment whenever he appears to advance the plot a notch and make a few poetic/philosophic observations before being whisked off stage again. This future hero of the Cuban revolution never comes to life. And the question as to whether María had an affair with Martí and whether he fathered one of her children never seems very compelling. After all, unlike Martí, María never existed. Or if she did, she’s such a pinched and prickly personality that she’d be hard to warm to. The entire María/Martí concept is just a portal into a time and place that Goldman (himself of mixed American and Guatemalan heritage) has learned much about and that he describes to us from many different angles. As a story, it’s a scattershot mess, but as a series of incidents it adds up to a compelling sketch of 19th-century Central American life.

Francisco Goldman reads this Tuesday, September 28, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner; call (617) 566-6660.


Issue Date: September 24 - 30, 2004
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