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eccles 's review for:
Season of the Swamp
by Yuri Herrera
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A disjointed, at times hallucinatory fever-dream of mid 19c New Orleans. The story loosely follows a group of dissident exiled Mexican revolutionaries through their accidental 18-months sojourn in this festering pustulant boil of a city, although without the blurb I’m not sure I’d have worked out that the central character was Benito Juarez, the Zapotec who would later become president of the country. But this is not a work that holds the reader by the hand. The narrative is episodic and disjointed, names are scarce and most encounters are unexpected and often inexplicable. Echoes of a kind of small-scale magical realism, one that suits the swampy and fever-ridden exoticism of the setting, the fug through which this man and his strange adventure slowly emerges. A translation, so hard to know who you’re reading, but there are a few odd word choices in places - particularly near the end - that jarred; notes of a contemporary register (“he was sharp, tuned in…”, “good times on the horizon”, ) that didn’t quite fit the archaic creole-gothic tenor of the whole. But the whole, though brief, is compelling, a sort of jambalaya of people, politics, entertainments and villainy served up in that humid, pestilential metropolis, slowly emerging from the mud