retracing the scars life has dealt you
plus a bookstore rec for when you're in Antigua
Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s traveling around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
Books in English are a dime a dozen in Antigua, Guatemala, but most of the ones you find, you won’t want to read. The first couple bookstores I walked into here featured mostly well-worn romance paperbacks, pulp fiction, travel guides, and diet manuals of decades past, all jumbled together on dusty shelves in no particular order.
But then one day, on my way to a salsa class, I spotted Antigua Books!
This place is run by one Troy, a guy who, a few decades ago, went surfing somewhere in Latin America and realized he didn’t actually have to return to the U.S. Will I have a similar realization in the coming months? I don’t surf, yet I wonder, wander —
But back to Troy: For some years he lived in Nicaragua, but — due to some unfriendliness he experienced toward Americans in that country — decided to move to Guatemala. Now he runs a tidy little bookstore here, divided about fifty-fifty between Spanish and English, with a nice Latin American literature-in-translation section.
So pay a visit to Troy and get some book recs should you find yourself in Antigua. On his advice, I bought a couple novels by Guatemalan authors — including the first on the list below —
The President by Miguel Angel Asturias (Waveland Press, 1963; originally published in Spanish in 1946)
Finding contemporary novels in translation , especially those from small countries like Guatemala, isn’t always easy. Last month I discovered Miguel — a Guatemalan author I’d never heard of — had won a Nobel prize in literature back in 1967. But when I tried to buy a kindle version of his most famous novel, I was stopped by a bunch of angry customer ratings warning that the digital version is actually near impossible to read on a kindle. So I managed to find a paperback version at Antigua Books — and discovered the hard copy looks like a cheap print-on-demand deal, put out by a teensy publisher called Waveland Press which has a website that looks like it was designed in the 90s —
Anyway. Published back in 1946, The President portrays life under a dictatorial president in which pretty much anyone can be robbed, beaten, jailed, tortured or killed by the government for little cause or none at all. People live in fear of false accusations and, when they inevitably get in trouble, try to appeal to the elusive president for help — to little avail. I found the story rather melodramatic at times, but get that it portrays an important piece of history — apparently the president of the novel is based on a past Guatemalan president. Read it to experience the chaos and scary magic realism of living under a totalitarian regime.
Get The President from Waveland Press
Human Matter by Rodrigo Rey Rosa (University of Texas, 2019)
Back in 2005, a huge archive of police records was found, detailing the disturbing things the Guatemalan National Police had gotten up to through most of the 1900s. That archive is now online — and also serves as the inspiration for this novel by Rodrigo, which features a novelist called Rodrigo conducting research at the archive as source material for a potential novel.
Rodrigo’s research process hits some snags. He mysteriously loses access to the archive — and his meetings to try to regain access keep getting delayed. But he doesn’t give up — he seeks other clandestine, potentially dangerous ways to get more info. “In a country like Guatemala everyone lives in constant physical danger,” he writes. Human Matter is a quiet yet eerie novel, half fact, half fiction, about the life of a writer. Read it if you love meta-novels with a kick of paranoia.
Get Human Matter from Bookshop
Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (Grove, 2021)
To get a real sense of the political history of Guatemala, you’d do best to pick up Francisco’s nonfiction work, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, a highly-acclaimed book about the 1998 assassination of a Guatemalan Catholic bishop by the military. But of course, that’s not what I chose to read. Instead I picked up Monkey Boy, Francisco’s latest — a work of autofiction about memory, identity, and family shot through with the regrets and hopes of late middle age.
The protagonist is Francisco Goldberg, who like the author is born of a Guatemalan mother and an abusive Jewish father and is a former journalist who wrote about the wars in Central America. Most of the book takes place during a trip Francisco takes to visit his mother in a nursing home. But the novel goes back and forth in time a lot, investigating family secrets, mending lost ties, revisiting and revising memories. Read it if you love retracing the scars life has dealt you, not so much to heal or soothe them, but simply to try to understand.
Get Monkey Boy from Bookshop
Once a month, I share book recommendations. Shape it by recommending a read!
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love — the “my sister got me a subscription to The Atlantic for xmas” edition:
The problem with being cool about sex. “Desire makes hypocrites of us all”
How I demolished my life. “Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this kitchen. Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this life. I didn’t want to renovate. I wanted to get divorced.”
The Roe baby. “Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, never had the abortion she was seeking…. After decades of keeping her identity a secret, Jane Roe’s child has chosen to talk about her life.”