The Medicine Man - Softcover

Gonzalez, Francisco Rojas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1891270079 ISBN 13: 9781891270079

Publisher: Latin American Literary Review Press, 2000

Synopsis

In his most celebrated work, Mexican writer Francisco Rojas González offers a rare blend of literature and indigenous anthropology. Inspired by his fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, these 13 stories reflect the author's preoccupation with the totality of Mexican life and capture his heralded ability to penetrate the contradictions of human nature. The book is a dramatic presentation of myths, religious beliefs, and customs of Mexican Indians framed in their rigid, overpowering code of ethics. It served as the basis for the 1954 film Roots, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1955.

About this title

About the Author

Francisco Rojas González was a Mexican author, screenwriter, diplomat, and ethnographer. He was the recipient of a National Prize for Literature and is known for having a significant impact on mid-20th-century Mexican literature and cinema. Robert S. Rudder is an editor and translator of several noteworthy Latin American novels. Gloria Arjona is the translator of numerous Spanish-language books. They are the cotranslators of The City of Kings and Nazarín.

Reviews

The original title of this collection of exotic short fiction was El Diosero, which translates more accurately as "god maker," and the protagonist of the title story is just that--a Caribe Indian who forms and destroys earthen god figures as imagination and necessity prompt him. The author, inspired by his travels to Chiapas, blends literary fiction with an anthropological view, painting vivid pictures of jungle and village scenes among the more obscure indigenous peoples of Mexico. A baby is christened Becycle after a passing doctor's bicycle, people are driven mad (or to their deaths) by an "uncle" who may be either a local spirit or a local hallucinogenic plant, a handsome young murderer is punished by being forced to marry a crone. One story features the author, mystified by one cultural curiosity after another, being told, "It's easier for us to understand your world than it is for city people to come to know our simple minds." True, but it is Gonzalez's insights into this world that have made this work a minor classic for half a century in Mexico. He is also a keen and poetic observer--he describes a famished village as preternaturally silent: lacking corn, its inhabitants lack tortillas, and thus "the perpetual sound of hand slapping of the women had become silent in the huts of the Coras." The film version of El Diosero won a first place at Cannes in 1955, yet the book is only now appearing in English. This slim but fascinating volume sheds a good deal of light, in absorbing detail, on the lives of remote Mexican tribes, many of which are on the verge of extinction. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Short story lovers will applaud this graceful English translation of one of two collections by a remarkably talented Mexican fiction writer (1904^-1951) whose anthropological fieldwork among Indian villages in remote locations was reflected in his intense stories. "The Sad Story of Pascola Cenobio" is a masterpiece. The young man Cenobia Tanori excels at folk dancing, traveling from village to village to show off his abilities. But he finally decides to settle down and marry and to take up more conventional labor. He hires on as a guide to a white man interested in finding precious metals in the local mountains. Cenobia is thus considered a traitor by his villagers, kills a man who makes a remark to him, and is sentenced to death; but his sentence is commuted by the deceased's old widow, who then makes the young, virile Cenobia marry her. The triumphs and disasters important to otherwise unimportant people are the themes Rojas Gonzalez sympathetically explores. He writes about noble souls, in exquisitely precise prose. Brad Hooper

Rojas Gonzalez (1904-51) was a Mexican anthropologist whose field work in remote Indian villages of his country inspired him to write two novels and two short story collections. This collection, which comprises 13 stories of six or seven pages each, was made into a movie that took first place at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955. Each of the stories ends with a surprise twist: an Indian widow, after grieving like "the silhouette of a frieze," begins to consume beans ravenously in the presence of a horrified priest; a frustrated yori (white) miner attempts to buy the daughter of an innkeeper in order to improve her Indian bloodline. In another, a tribal dancer on the eve of marriage to his sweetheart is forced to marry another woman in order to save his life. Because knowledge of the indigenous peoples of Mexico is so meager, Rojas's fiction also serves as a fresh source of anthropological data. The translators have supplied a two-page glossary of Indian terms and practices unfamiliar to readers of English. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.
-Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Latin American Literary Review Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1891270079
• ISBN 13: 9781891270079
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 127