‘The Bullet Swallower’ Explores Who Pays for the Debts of Ancestors https://ift.tt/JlOuDiS
Américo Paredes meets Cormac McCarthy with a dash of Jovita González in Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ third novel, The Bullet Swallower, a stunning new addition to a long tradition of Texas borderland narratives. Gonzalez James returns home to South Texas to tell a deeply personal and (mostly) true story about her great-grandfather, El Tragabalas, the actual bullet swallower. Spanning the early 1800s to 1965, The Bullet Swallower tells the tale of the famed Sonoro family over several generations.
“Alferez Antonio Sonoro was born with gold in his eyes,” begins Gonzalez James, giving both a character description and an indication of the greed of the Sonoro family. Hailing from Spain, the family settled in Dorado, a fictionalized town located on the border between Mexico and South Texas in the fertile reach of the Rio Grande. The Sonoro family opens a gold mine, and soon, like parasites, they begin to feed off the earth itself, greedily drawing from its bowels using Indigenous labor. They become known as movers and shakers in the Mexican colony of Spain. They are wealthy beyond belief but known for the cruel treatment of their Indigenous workers. The abuse of the Indigenous peoples who work for them, alongside the Sonoro’s own folly, brings a curse upon the once wealthy family that haunts the next several generations, spurring the narrative forward.
The remainder of the novel pivots between the narrations of Antonio Sonoro, of Dorado, Mexico, in 1895; Jamie Sonoro, of Mexico City, New Mexico, in 1964; selections from a ‘found’ book entitled The Ignominious History of The Sonoro Family: From Antiquity to Present by a fictional historian from 1783 Spain; and from the perspective of a character simply known as Remedio, the shadow that follows the Sonoro men from generation to generation, waiting to call in the debt owed by the family.
The Bullet Swallower takes up questions about culpability, familial responsibility, colonialism, enslavement, state-sanctioned violence against people of color, fate versus preordination and breaking generational cycles. It takes on the topic of Spanish colonial trauma and abuse, depicting in vivid detail the dark history of the Texas Rangers. It shows the racial politics of Texas and critiques the blatant land grabs by Anglo-Texans that displaced earlier colonial actors. Drawing on historical events, myths and family stories, The Bullet Swallower asks what the relationship between revenge, retribution, reparation and remedy is. It poses readers the question of who pays for the debts of our ancestors, and it does so with lyrical, readable and expressive prose.
In one particularly lyrical passage, Gonzalez James includes an excerpt from The Ignominious History that meditates on the linear nature of time and the waves of pain and violence that recur despite such linearity:
It is understood by all intelligent men that time moves forward in a linear fashion, one moment followed by another, the events of the past firmly situated in the precedent, and as unreachable to modern men as the sun is to the moon.
And yet, I observe a disquieting pattern when I construct the lineage of the Sonoros, as I found myself seeing not a line but a recursion. Or, perhaps this is not the correct word. Reversion? I see a return, a perpetual collapsing in of the story: pain begetting pain begetting atrocities begetting recriminations begetting pain begetting pain.
…
Time does not move forward. It circles, spirals, pivots, and repeats. Echoes of another’s memories live within us, impelling us around and around, ensuring that the story closes itself, that the pattern resounds, that the picture from up high is a shape infinitely repeating.
Many of the excerpts from The Ignominious History function similarly, allowing the reader into the novel’s more abstract and meditative themes without placing such a burden on the characters.
In contrast, other sections, including the dialogue between characters, are sometimes humorous despite the high stakes of these scenes. Antonio banters with different characters he meets along his Don Quixote-esq journey, including Peter Ainsley, an Englishman he meets in Corpus Christi under harrowing circumstances:
“You’re not Mexican,” Antonio said.
“And thank heaven for that.”
“Why are you shooting your own people?”
The rifle fired two more rounds and Antonio heard two more bodies drop. “My own people?” the man asked, sounding incredulous. “My good man, Texans are pigs who’ve been taught to stand upright and ride a horse. I’m English.”
Despite the frequent, and often deserved, jabs at the United States and Texas, the novel artfully critiques the racial and social politics of the time. It shines a light on the inequities and acts of violence many Texans and Mexicans faced, and still face today. Indeed, The Bullet Swallower is a complicated story for complicated times, presenting main characters that are just as complex and fraught.
The Bullet Swallower is a tour de force, offering readers a simultaneously white-knuckle and meditative journey through Mexico and Texas. It deftly weaves tropes from Westerns, gothic literature, corridos and magical realism alongside actual Texan and family history. Deeply researched, beautifully written and uncannily relevant today, the novel re-envisions what a borderlands narrative can accomplish in the twenty-first century. The Bullet Swallower is a welcome addition to the Texas literary scene.
FICTION The Bullet Swallower By Elizabeth Gonzalez James
Simon and Schuster
Published January 23, 2024
0 Commentaires