MEDEA SANG ME A CORRIDO, latest feminist redemption of a Classical-mythology woman's character

MEDEA SANG ME A CORRIDO
DAHLIA DE LA CERDA (tr. Heather Cleary & Julia Sanches)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A punk revival of Medea as a Mexican anti-angel of birth and death, from the International Booker Prize–nominated author of Reservoir Bitches

In Northern Mexico, Paulina, Perla, Antonia, Reina, and Jordan are striving to survive the barrio—hustling on the edge of a cartel-run economy, nursing the wounds made normal in a world that eats its own. Hovering over their trials is a spirit with gothic flair, dressed in black and crowned with braids: Medea, a mythic mother of the Chihuahuan desert, ancient as the Aztecs but never too old to be petty.

From aiding a trophy girlfriend’s abortion, to accompanying a mother in her search for her lost child in the desert, to embracing those taken too soon in the narco’s brutal proxy wars, Medea fights for justice for her chosen mortals—her divine wrath the only power that could rival the corrupt, violent web spun by the cartel, the government, and the military. Dahlia de la Cerda’s magnetic prose draws readers right into the heart of that web—and links all our fates to the missions of Medea, equal parts midwife and gravedigger, a femme fatale god in a femicidal world.

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

My Review: Repurposing classical myths for the twenty-first century is a...subgenre? full genre? literary storytelling technique?...an effort I enjoy a great deal. Medea repurposed as avenging goddess, destroying angel, wrathful righter of women's victimization, has double appeal for me. It corrects what I've always seen as the calumniation of a powerful healer-semidivinity with the accusation of insane jealousy over a man who has abandoned her for another woman. She is accused in classical sources of murdering her children, born of her body, to exact revenge on a faithless fucker she literally enabled, by using her skills and knowledge, to come to power and riches.

A healer-spirit so skilled she is regarded as divine.

Male anxiety much, Euripides?

So I've never found the famous version of Medea at all convincing. It smacks of an attempt to invalidate a powerful and skilled woman by making her hyperfocused on a man; by accusing a mother of murdering her children born of her body because a man hurt her feelings by betraying her with another woman.

Hogwash.

No better mythological figure, then, to be repurposed into a guardian of women in a seriously patriarchal, femicidal culture like that of the narcotraficantes. Setting these interconnected stories...more like very well-defined chapters than actual stories, what I myownself have always referred to as "braided stories" because, like a braid, the separate strands are evident while making together a whole effect not possible for the strands separately (see Celeste Mohammed's works)...in what she calls "Aztlán," the narcostate existing in Northern Mexico where femicide is appallingly rampant offers Author Dahlia wide scope for Medea's redemption. As an avenger, Medea appears here with clear markers of supernatural power: "Then she kissed me on the forehead and shot through the sky in a snake-drawn carriage," is not a description of an everyday person. Six women in dire trouble are visited and assisted by Medea in barely over a hundred pages.

None of them are spotless, sweet little fembots, which is a relief. Messy, horny, misguided people are innumerable across the globe and occur in every ray of the rainbow of identities humans so love to pretend are Ordained and Immutable. Medea ignores these ideologically driven cultural fripperies to effect redress for the wronged.

It's satisfying to me because I like Ma'at being served by Justice (very different in my observation from mere "justice" such as the travesty being perpetrated by the US government department using that name). Medea, in Author Dahlia's hands, serves and renders Justice even in the face of "justice."

I have only one critique to offer in support of my just-off-perfect rating of the work: sometimes speed is not your friend when offering tendentious and muckraking narratives. I felt, by the end of the read, I was not in possession of enough facets of each woman's life experience to grasp the motivation for Medea coming to the rescue. It's not necessary for the story of Medea as avenger to be formed and shaped. That is done, and the shape is one I found enrichingly sharp. I was not utterly enthralled where that was *easily* within Author Dahlia's reach.

It's a braid of great beauty. It stops short of Divine Grace. And it is so urgently necessary for all of us to get our heads around the reason it exists I'm here pushing it at you. Please pick one up soonest.

RECITAL OF THE DARK VERSES, translation of Mexican poet's bizarre, fact-based religious heist novel

RECITAL OF THE DARK VERSES
LUIS FELIPE FABRE (tr. Heather Cleary)
Deep Vellum
$17.95 trade paper ,available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A masterful undertaking of historical literature, following 16th century religious fervor in a picaresque novel about Saint John of the Cross.

In August 1592, a bailiff and his two assistants arrive at the monastery of Úbeda, with the secret task of transferring the body of Saint John of the Cross, the great Carmelite poet and mystic who had died the previous year, to his final abode in Segovia. When they exhume him, they find a body incorrupted and as fresh as when he died.

Thus commences a series of adventures and misfortunes, with characters that seem to be drawn from mythology. The story written by Luis Felipe Fabre masterfully intertwines with the verses of the friar, as if in them he had prophesied the delirium that would surround his own posthumous transfer. Fabre's text is a highly entertaining novel, full of a sense of humor that manages to honor the mystical poetry of the Carmelite while inviting the reader to reflect on issues such as the sacred and the profane, the body and the soul, and spiritual (and carnal) ecstasy.

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

My Review: This is another novel inspred by actual events. Unlike Amy Chua's fictionalized take on a horrible man's murder, this is so wildly OTT from its start to its finish that I was never sure if I should be laughing as hard as I was...it was AT the inept thieves and their looney beliefs, not gently with their haplessness...or just shaking my damn head at how religion screws people up and over seven ways from Sunday. There's nothing to it, I thought. Pick it up and the snark will flow like spice from Arrakis.

I think there might really be a God, because that was so very not what happened.

This is a piercingly beautiful translation of what I'm sure is a glorious read in its native Spanish. The author's very clearly a poet...who else would've chosen St. John of the Cross, that queer-coding mystic (itself Catholic code for "weirdo we can't afford to ignore") poet, and his deeply hilarious and utterly inappropriate post-mortem heist-cum-road-trip from his monastery to Segovia, there to be enshrined until finally officially made a saint? The best part is that this is fictionalized, not fictional. This weirdness really happened! History is so very much more peculiar than fantasy. Humanity, in all its unpreditability, can't be bettered by one human's imagination. Just the bare facts of the saint's life...impoverished yet noble childhood, imprisonment and torture for being Too Much for his monastic brethren, summons by St. Teresa of Ávila (herself a mystically horny writer) to join her in founding the Discalced Carmelites.

The book is structured around verses of the saint's poetry. It is part and parcel of the reading experience. I, famously allergic to poetry, would rush right out to buy a copy of the translator's edition of St. John of the Cross's works. The reason is simple: This is, for all its mannered construction and sonorous linguistic register, the horniest stuff I've ever read that wasn't ab initio meant to be one-handed reading. Reading the quoted passages to my Young Gentleman Caller, I realized how very badly I miss having him in the same place as me. If you get my drift.

The thing that most surprised me about this read is its playfulness. Not one page doesn't contain something to raise a smile or a happy reflection. This is not something I ever expect from a story about a religious figure, though that was short-sighted of me...the mystics were by definition not religious figures but spiritual seekers co-opted by religion. The three stooges who are sent to convey the body of St. John of the Cross to Segovia are not religious figures but servants of power tasked with a temptingly valuable object's care. That the object is a body really isn't that important to them, as it wouldn't be in that time and place. Holy relics were objects to be traded, stolen, acquired, and coveted, not a person's Earthly remains. Holy people were of a different substance than mere mortals and were thus not treated in death as were us dirtballs.

This is completely part of the story. I am not religious (let go of your pearls, Mary, it's not the first time you've heard that) but am very much of the mindset that, once one's done with the meat of the body, it ought to go back to the earth that formed it. Every so often, as the posthumous indignities were wrought on John of the Cross's person, I found myself surprised into awareness that this was a person's flesh. The casual presumption that the problem with the things happening to the flesh were centered around others's claims to ownership of it, not the horror of doing these dreadful things to a person (even though a dead one) jolted me.

The prose in this translation is, to my soul's ear, exactly right in its register of formal, mildly archaic, still fluidly readable English. Different enough to give the effect of listening to someone with a beautiful voice speaking to you in foreigner's English...a thing I myownself enjoy...but not to everyone's taste, I know. Be aware of this fact before buying...the Kindle edition, available the tenth of October, allows one to try a sample before buying and the sensitive-to-Otherness would do well to try before committing to ownership. Alternatively, an excerpt appeared on the LitHub website.

One aspect of the English read that I found extra-pleasurable was the mental image of reading a translation of a story about a Translation was quite piquant. It's one of the more rareified pleasures of reading translations, but a deep one. In general, the Anglophone world sees little appeal in reading translated literature. This really is never more sad to me than when discovering an imagination as agile and as horny as Author Fabre's is. This story, fact-based as it is, should be on everyone's radar. The pleasures of being in the deeply, delightedly earthy and Earthly company of the three men who Translate the holy remains (though not wholly, pun intended) as they discover themselves and their Otherness in his company are readily available to you thanks to Translator Cleary and Deep Vellum.

No less a luminary than Valeria Luiselli (Lost Children Archive, The Story of My Teeth) thinks this book should make waves among Anglophone readers. Happen I agree. It certainly should, and let it start with you.