THE DEPOPULATION, interesting fictional treatment of factual event

THE DEPOPULATION
MARINA CLOSS (tr. Thomas Bunstead)
Bellevue Literary Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From a major new talent in Latin American literature comes a tale of cultures, languages, spirits, and the natural world on the brink of transformation

“Of all the happy, hermitic lands, the Guayrá was the jewel.”

So begins this polyphonic wonder of a novel set in a 17th-century Jesuit mission founded within the wild South American subtropics by the mystical and intense Father Ruiz and his assistant Father Maceta. As the priests seek to convert the indigenous Guaraní and unravel the many religious mysteries that surround them, the harmony of their community is abruptly upended by the arrival of Overá, who announces himself as the Son of God and younger brother of Jesus. But an even larger threat presents itself when word arrives that European marauders and slave hunters will soon descend upon the peaceful mission, compelling Overá and the priests to launch a mass exodus into the heart of the jungle.

Full of humor, passion, and terror, The Depopulation brilliantly evokes the moment when modernity’s spark set fire to a still-magic world.

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

My Review: A story of two halves: in the beginning were words describing a vanished jungle world, evoking heat humidity and the stunning void of loss and emptiness...I was utterly drawn into this world, so much so that my summer shirt-changing schedule ramped up. So sweaty in sympathy was I that I couldn't read the story in bed for obvious reasons. The evocation of the world where the colonizers and the colonized agreed that god(s) speak to us and through some of us they choose left me rapt.

Comes the arrival of Overá and the languid, interesting story of these spiritual imperialists trying to fill a void...a void of hierarchy...turns slower, because the focus stops being on Ruiz and Maceta working to learn about and build over the world they've chosen to be in. This is also when the main body of colonizers, rapacious boring caricatures to a man, arrive to rape, pillage, and clap.

It's ironic that my favorite part was when the spiritual imperialists were center stage. Given my antipathy to the religion the men were foisting on already traumatized people, it does not make any sense to me that the secular depredations, more kinetic in their lineaments, should be the part where my attention flagged. The truth is, if the focus had shifted to the acts and actions of these horrifying greed-machines in action, I'd've put the book down never to be picked up again. Tale as old as time, beauty destroyed by beasts; I've read it, no need for more.

Author Closs titled the book accurately. The story of these white-savior priests leading the great unwashed (in the blood of The Lamb, repulsive image that is) native people away from the slavers and the greedy just...well, it felt try-hard. They're good for trying to use their knowledge of what the colonizers are up to as a means to protect their charges from it.

It's the "their charges" bit that sorta messes up my pleasure in the story. Overá (it feels like there's a Portuguese pun in that name, I'm sure of it, something like "truth-teller" or "honest guy" but it can't quite form in my mind because I don't know enough) and his delusions popped me out of the story because my frame of reference...I've known schizophrenic men, with delusions they're certain are THE Truth, so Overá is familiar to me. The flipside of familiarity in this case is lack of ability to see through the story's deistic-sovereignty lens. I see through my twenty-first century mental-illness lens the disordered thinking of a paranoid person's delusions.

So it really frustrated me not to continue to be swept away, yet that was what I experienced. The language Translator Bunstead used to present the ideas was lushly evocative. It seems likely to me that most others will not be so rigidly entrenched in psychotheraputic ideas as to be unable to set aside the twenty-first century long enough to immerse themselves in the sixteenth. It was a lovely visit for me, just a mite too short to last all story long.

While I was there, I had a lovely time. I hope you'll get into the depopulating Amazon and stay for the full ride.