Hunger's Brides - Hardcover

Anderson, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1845291719 ISBN 13: 9781845291716

Publisher: Constable, 2005

Synopsis

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Review:

Book Description: On a frigid winter's night, a man escapes from an apartment in which a young woman lies bleeding. In his hands he clutches a box he has found there. He is Donald Gregory, a once-respected college professor and serial adulterer, whose last affair has left his career in ruins. She is Beulah Limosneros, one of his students and for a brief time his lover. She had disappeared into Mexico two years earlier, following her obsession with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was born in 1648, entered a convent at age nineteen, and became the greatest poet of her time, only to die of plague in 1695. As a police investigation closes in around Gregory, he examines the box’s contents, fearful of incriminating evidence Beulah may have against him--translated poems of Sor Juana, a travel journal, research notes on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Inquisition, diary entries concerning him, and a strange manuscript about Sor Juana. Based on the life of one of literature's most compelling figures, Paul Anderson's astonishing debut unveils a great poet's withdrawal from the world who at the height of her creative powers signs a vow of contrition in her own blood.

From Publishers Weekly:

A nearly 1,500-page novel that was 12 years in the making deserves consideration, even though in this instance, its complex central story could have been told in 500 pages. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz died of the plague in Mexico in 1695, and for the next two centuries her work was rarely referenced or read. Her poems, confessions and life story were rediscovered in the 20th century, most notably by Mexican poet Octavio Paz. In Anderson's elephantine debut novel, Sor Juana's story is told through the testimony of her "secretary," Antonia Mora (her intellectual equal), Carlos Sigüenza y Gongora (a rival and a suitor), her confessor, Father Núñez (an enemy), and Sor Juana herself. We follow her fortunes from her illegitimate birth, through her inability to find success as a poet and scholar (due both to her gender and the authoritarian nature of colonial Mexican society), her taking of the veil and-finally-her downfall. As if distrusting his material, however, Anderson encloses Sor Juana's story within a contemporary tale focused on Beulah Limosneros, a brilliant but unstable student of Sor Juana's writing who begins an affair with Donald Gregory, her married English professor. With Gregory, Beulah re-enacts the scorned woman role à la Fatal Attraction with a passive-aggressive twist. Beulah keeps a journal that is a mixture of sophomoric beat poetry and mystical descriptions of sex. She is the embodiment of present day angst: there are food issues, childhood abuse, low self-esteem. There are hundreds too many pages of her interior life. The conjunction of Limosneros's story and Sor Juana's is mutually weakening. Still, the central narration is definitely worth following, particularly for its version of the inevitable conflict between beauty, intellect and government power. Unfortunately, the framing story is ludicrous; this is no Pale Fire. Sor Juana's translated verse doesn't jump out (despite some translations by Paz), but her confession does, as does the way Anderson conveys the gradual closing in of forces beyond her control, reminiscent of Akhmatova's confrontations with Stalin.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Constable
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1845291719
• ISBN 13: 9781845291716
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1408