Foreign Correspondence V

A review of Yuri Herrera's new novel for the New York Times

Hello! Happy Inauguration Day to those who keep the faith. Here’s hoping that Claudia Sheinbaum, who is about to become the first woman to serve as president of the United Mexican States, governs like my friends who support her assure me she secretly intends to, rather than like she has said she will.

In the event the holiday has left you in the mood to contemplate the proposition that men and women make their own history, but not under conditions of their choosing, the New York Times just published my review of the English translation of Yuri Herrera’s new novel, Season of the Swamp. Here’s a bit to whet your appetite:

Among the tragic heroes and comic villains who fill the pantheon of Mexican history, few command more solemn respect than Benito Juárez, who in the mid-19th century rose from destitute origins to become his country’s first Indigenous president. His place in the national imagination is not unlike the one a Black Abraham Lincoln might have occupied in America: a secular saint who overcame racist barriers to bring justice and reform to the motherland. His canonization may well be warranted, but as it happens with most victims of hagiography, it’s hard to think of Juárez without yawning.

And so it is a testament to Yuri Herrera’s virtuosic talents that his new novel, “Season of the Swamp,” manages to breathe new life into a character who had long become a wax figure. Instead of subjecting us to yet another retelling of Juárez’s more exalted moments, Herrera has chosen to focus on an unglamorous interlude in the future president’s biography: the 18 months of exile that Juárez spent in antebellum New Orleans.

Herrera is one of the truly great novelists working in Spanish these days, and his new book doesn’t disappoint. I think it might inaugurate a new period in his career, one more concerned with the appropriation of historical documents and with the phenomenology of perception than with narrative or plot. It’s also blessedly short: you can read it in a day off, such as the one all Mexicans are enjoying today.

I leave you with the last few lines of a poem by WH Auden, which you should imagine are about Mexico rather than about the US:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.