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A review by aegagrus
Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis by Edgar Garcia
4.5
Emergency is an excellent collection of short essays meditating upon the Popol Vuh and its resonance in America today. Edgar Garcia does not hit you over the head with direct modern parallels or political moralism. Instead, he carefully elucidates themes such as ambivalence, duality, displacement, and empathy, briefly putting those themes in dialogue with the world in which we live and letting you work out the rest. Importantly, Garcia is very comfortable leaving questions unanswered or acknowledging a multiplicity of possible answers. The result is that reading this book feels very much like working through Popol Vuh alongside Garcia; paying close attention to the historical text, then resurfacing to the present context with new lines of thought suggesting themselves.
Garcia also does an excellent job of explaining the Popol Vuh itself. I came away with meaningful insight on K'iche' cosmology, on how to conceptualize the hazy "penumbral anticipation" in which the Popol Vuh takes place, on the troubled history of the colonial-era manuscript that is our only extant source, and on the ways in which the Popol Vuh has been a resource and a dialogue partner for Maya and Latin American activists, poets, mystics, and everyday people up to the present. I would not have gotten any of these insights to the same degree had I just read a translation of the Popol Vuh, even a well-annotated one.
Emergency is a quick read and an elegant work, each essay clearly identifying a conceptual focus but also fitting cleanly into the sequence of ideas through which Garcia is working. I highly recommend this book.
Garcia also does an excellent job of explaining the Popol Vuh itself. I came away with meaningful insight on K'iche' cosmology, on how to conceptualize the hazy "penumbral anticipation" in which the Popol Vuh takes place, on the troubled history of the colonial-era manuscript that is our only extant source, and on the ways in which the Popol Vuh has been a resource and a dialogue partner for Maya and Latin American activists, poets, mystics, and everyday people up to the present. I would not have gotten any of these insights to the same degree had I just read a translation of the Popol Vuh, even a well-annotated one.
Emergency is a quick read and an elegant work, each essay clearly identifying a conceptual focus but also fitting cleanly into the sequence of ideas through which Garcia is working. I highly recommend this book.