SEASON OF THE SWAMP, historical figure in historic city navigating his way into History

SEASON OF THE SWAMP
YURI HERRERA (tr. Lisa Dillman)
Graywolf Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.

Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.

Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez’s time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A vividly imagined and intensely told expansion on the historical record of President Juárez's exile from Mexico. Arriving in New Orleans, with its slave markets, must've been a shock coming from Mexico thirtyish years after the trade was outlawed and slavery abolished there. Like everything else Juárez thought or felt in those years, though, Author Herrera has had to reconstruct it from the known, more importantly the documented, facts of his later life.

So it is that the events related in this novel can't be verified; there aren't any records in his, or anyone else who was there's, own words what the people around Juárez said, or thought, or felt. This reconstructed tale that relies on the history of New Orleans in 1853 as extensively documented has the feel of verisimilitude. We can't know if Author Herrera got it all, as regards Juárez at least, factually correct, but I can tell you he got it right.

Juárez, as an Indigenous Mexican in the US at that fraught passage in our history, would've seen and been the subject of the nastiest kind of "racial" prejudice. Mexico was no kind of enlightened paradise at this moment, but there was no threat of being kidnapped, then sold into slavery, as the was in the antebellum South. I don't know if one major plot point relating to slavery is factual, but it wouldn't surprise me. In fact I kind of hope it was, even if it wasn't Juárez's own story. (You'll know as soon as you run across it which one I mean.)

If this story has an overriding virtue, it is that it is short enough to be an all-day-and-done read. I think it's going to be hard to put down once you begin it, so that's a very good thing. Among the events rendered all the more effectively for being curtailed in length is Juárez's immigrant journey of acquiring the local language, English, on top of his native Zapotec and the Mexican national tongue Spanish. Three very different grammars, poor bastard, and (as we who speak English first do not realize) extremely complicated to navigate the world in.

Author Herrera's writing style is both evocative and without frills and furbelows, eg: "What are we willing to ignore, or let atrophy, for the right to indolence. What a monstrous thing, comfort." It's not flowery and it's not plain. Translator Dillman is clearly working to a high level and from a highly polished source. This is the kind of work I hope we will get from author, translator, and publisher, as a team or separately, for a long time to come.

Almost five stars for compact, beautiful, concise storytelling. Some minor rubbing of noses cost it a half-star.