A little Zorro anyone?

Isabel Allende is the masterful Latin American author of such classics as The House of Spirits and City of the Beasts. In Zorro, she takes the now infamous character and attempts to trace his origins and influences. She weaves a magical tapestry of indigenous and colonial characters who serve in various roles as mentors or foils to the young Diego de la Vega.

I remember my first encounter with the fox. I was a young boy who was mostly unsupervised during Saturday morning TV viewing. Consequently I ignored the more traditional cartoons and scanned the movie channels for something more exciting. I was delighted when I found "The Adventures of Robin Hood" starring Errol Flynn. It was magnificent swashbuckling at its very best. And that smile. Flynn never loses his smile through highly choreographed fight scenes. A close second was "The Mark of Zorro" starring a fairly dashing Tyrone Power. Little did I know that this was merely the fifth movie featuring the masked crusader and precursor to the comic heroes of today. Tyrone Power was not quite Errol Flynn but his sword fights with Basil Rathbone were the equal of anything done by Errol Flynn. And he did his best to keep a dashing grin plastered to his visage throughout many exploits of daring-do. Then of course, there are the more recent films starring Antonio Banderas, whose Spanish heritage and language provided a slightly more realistic portrayal of the masked hero. (Sorry Tyrone, you were just a little too white to be believable.)

So I jumped at the chance to read Allende's version of the legend who had shaped my childhood. I hoped that Allende would do justice to the hero of justicia. I hoped that she would de-Europeanize an essentially indigenous colonial hero. And in so doing, I hoped that she would not over-intellectualize a character who has more in common with Spiderman than Che Guevara. I lay a tremendous burden on the authors I read, but I felt confident that Allende would be able to pull it off. And for the most part, she did.

Allende's Zorro is mestizo. He is half indigenous American and half European colonizer. Given his heritage, it is no wonder that he would grow to live a life full of conflict. Allende goes about describing his Diego's mestizo heritage in a tricky way. Diego's Spanish father is a coldly efficient man, a father who loves deeply but from a distance, while Diego's india mother and milk-brother Bernardo are cautious yet deeply loving and caring. On the one hand, you have a large cold room in the mansion, while on the other lies the cozy bedroom with a roaring fire, warm blanket, and hot cup of cocoa. In his early years, Diego's life is a balancing act between his heritage. He is expected to be the Don, a wealthy colonial landownder who keeps order, provides for the people, and is above reproach. Yet Diego secretly yearns for the almost mystical life represented by his mother, grandmother, and milk-brother. And before long (this is Zorro after all) Diego finds a way to be both the son of a Don and a living embodiment of the indigenous culture that is slowly being destroyed.

Allende often uses magical realism as a technique to explore the metaphysics of the Americas, and she takes it a step further in this book utilizing what I like to call 'tragic magic realism.' The history of the United States is a violent clash of ideas, cultures, and people, and Allende does not attempt to hide this or write her way out of it. She embraces this history (the tragic) but does so in way that respects it and brings it to life without overly romanticizing it (the magical realism). I think that one major danger she faced was to lose the European heritage of the character, but she manages to narrate his time in Spain in an honest, engaging way. However, Allende does not let the reader lose sight of the cultural struggles that engulf Diego de la Vega. In the Americas, he is confronted with the clash between indiginismo and colonialism, while in Spain he is confronted with the vulgar class violence and nationalism that rocked the Napoleanic Age. Allende adds another layer of complexity by introducing a tribe of Roma, or gypsy, who for ages have been amongst the most discriminated against and persecuted groups in Europe. Members of this tribe become fast friends and mentors to young Diego, which gives him another 'cause' to fight for. Allende's task in taking on the Zorro story was made all the more difficult because he was written essentially as a pulp hero. Yet, she gives Zorro cultural depth and complex emotional issues without turning her novel into some sort of insipid melodrama - no small feat. This is her major accomplishment in this book.

But there are problems - the first and most pressing is the narration. The book begins with a narrative voice that is very dry, bland, and unsentimental. The narrator, whose identity is revealed in the end (though astute readers will figure it out well before then), has absolutely no reason to be so boring, which makes the reading of this book all the more laborous. In the beginning, I fervently hoped that the bland narrative voice would give way to something less formal and more organic, more wholesome, yet this change never occured. It seems that Allende was made aware of this dilemma and tried, during very short interludes, to add more character to the narrator. She failed. Her editor failed. And the book suffers. Aside from an emotionless narrator, the narrative style of this text should have been reconsidered. The narrator is a character in the text looking back on the formative history of Diego de la Vega. A third-person perspective would have accomplished much the same in telling the story and perhaps given Allende a more colorful palette to choose from. Second, Allende has a multi-volume story on her hands. Unfortunately, she chose to pack it all into one book. In addition to bland narration, Zorro suffers from poor pacing and a lack of strong editing. Allende or her editor should have been courageous enough to develop certain characters and scenes at length while leaving others on the cutting-room floor. Instead, there are one or two well-developed characters who reside in a fairly 2-dimensional world. Ultimately, Allende's skill is not put to full use in this novel. Finally, but in relation to the issue of narration, Allende's skill does not shine forth in the words on the page. There is an unacceptable distance between the text and the reader, and it is a distance that absolutely should not exist given the subject, the author, and a potentially vast reading audience of all backgrounds.

Despite its inconsistencies I recommend this book to others. There are many serious political writers in the world and there are many entertaining ones. Allende made her reputation as the former but in Zorro manages to pull of the latter as well. It is a delightful and welcome addition to my bookshelf and can be for yours as well.

Whatever happened to Scout?

I am not a terribly good reader of non-fiction. I've done my fair share so far with graduate school and all on my resume, but I was never particularly delighted by the whole thing. I cannot pinpoint my internal angst over the "real" stuff. My father, who taught me to read primarily by modeling what an avid reader does, is a prolific reader of non-fiction - two or three books a week if he can afford to get new ones. (The library long ago banned my family from its cozy confines.) And when he can't get anything new he just rereads the books in his thousand-deep library. (He suffers from an inability to read fiction. Go figure.) My mother is a librarian. Given this literary genealogy, you'd think that I'd be okay with books of all sorts, but the non-fiction tomes usually elicit a grimace followed by avoidance or a deep sigh that presages a Sisyphisian-like effort. I'll read 'em, but by god I won't be liking it.

Unless a book's author is a member of or devotee to the Frankfurt School, I really don't have the sustained ability to read non-fiction. There's very little inherent puzzle-solving in the genre. It's very tiered and organized and nicely laid out for the detail-oriented types who get into such things. I prefer the psychological zaniness that comes from narrative, that macabre technique that attempts to bring individual structure to pyschological chaos. And I like mysteries (not only the genre but in general). Fiction in its various forms tends often to be about mystery and puzzle-solving, which I suspect is why I love it so. Good fiction is like finding yourself in a new city without a map, a friend, or any food. Survival becomes a matter of some urgency, and you have only your wits to guide you. It's quite a thrill. (When reading a favorite author the situation is the same except you've got that friend encouraging you along your journey.)

Recently though I took a delightful stroll through a rather interesting piece of non-fiction. Mockingbird by Charles Shields is a brilliant biography of the infamously shy and notoriously quick-tongued Nelle Harper Lee, beloved author of To Kill a Mockingbird. While Shields' writing is more Beverly Cleary than Frederic Jameson, his investigative skill is top-notch. Lee quit giving interviews several decades back and never appreciated public attempts to intrude on her private life. This made Shields' task significantly more difficult, yet he somehow manages to paint a mysterious and deeply enduring picture of an author who wrote not merely of an era but of the entirety of American history through the eyes of a precocious pre-pubescent.

Most astute readers figure out the deeply autobiographical features of To Kill a Mockingbird quite early on, and many are left wondering whatever happened to young Scout, serious Jem, and the other residents of Maycomb. (Of course, there is very little mystery left surrounding young Dill, except perhaps the source of Capote's deep suspicion of those who dared love him.) Lee never wrote anything else, despite several different on-going projects, and has quietly slipped into the mists of her fictional alter-ego, Jean Louise. Yet the real Nelle Harper Lee is alive and well, living an active life in Monroeville, Alabama (the source of the fictional Maycomb), with annual sojourns to New York City, the town that nurtured her budding genius. Shields does an excellent job of charting Nelle's life in tiny, yet thriving, Monroeville up to the success of her first and only book. He finds long-lost friends, antagonistic sororiety sisters, and fellow literary aspirants, all of whom spoke candidly about the brash young Nelle. Lee became quite famous during the decade or so following the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, and Shields keep readers informed of the most historically documented portion of her life. Then he uses his impressive research skills to speculate on the last 4 decades of her life. He reaches very few solid conclusions, though his speculations are sound, fair, and obviously the result of a someone who loved her book as much as the rest of us.

In the end, he does justice to the book, the author, and to the mystery that continually surrounds Nelle Harper Lee. I don't make it through many of the "real" ones, but this one is excellent, well worth the time and the puzzle.