The Journal of Antonio Montoya

Ramona drove through town and took the road behind the village office and pulled up to the front of her house. She shut off the engine and looked at her nephew. She would feed Jose some lunch, and then she would see. Jose looked over at her, and Ramona reached out her hand and brushed lightly at his hair.
"Let's go inside, Jose," she said. "We'll have some lunch and drink something warm."
The two of them climbed out of the truck. A slight breeze blew, and the water from the cottonwoods fell on them in large fat drops. Before they reached the house, the front door swung open and Ramona's grandfather, Epolito Montoya, who had been dead for thirteen years, stood in the doorway.
"Why are you out in the rain?" he said.

Ramona Montoya, the main character of this slight but beautifully written first novel set in a dusty, timeless Southwestern town, is a 44-year-old painter whose house is inhabited by a host of dead relatives who speak, make coffee and occasionally borrow her truck. After her brother and sister-in-law are killed when their car hits a cow standing in the middle of the road, Ramona takes charge of her young nephew, Jose. (At the burial, Jose's mother sits up in her coffin and says "Ramona, I want you to take Jose.") Ramona's other brother, Flavio, estranged from his sister, is so unnerved by the ghostly relatives, he gives up on the idea of removing Jose from his strange new home. Ramona's dead grandmother, after clearing the table one night, hands her the journal of Antonio Montoya, another relative and a sculptor of religious statues. The 1924 journal is the story of the village, full of births, deaths, feuds and accidents, and its entries are woven into the narrative as Ramona reads them. While Ramona's story is imbued with her painterly sensibilities, the journal provides glimpses into the sculptor's art, the role of the santos in the lives of some of the villagers and the fate of the statues, which Ramona and little Jose will find. The novel becomes a mystical meditation on the workings of the artistic mind, but it begs for more of a plot. Still, Collignon delivers his own engaging brand of magical realism with a spare style, deadpan humor and bracingly fresh descriptions.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After Jose Montoya's parents are killed by a cow, the deceased mother requests from her casket that her spinster sister-in-law, Ramona, raise the orphan. Returning home, Ramona finds her equally defunct grandparents waiting for her. They reveal to her a truncated journal written by her grandfather's cousin Antonio in which events and relatives are linked in an unending continuum that has no end; in fact maybe everything has already happened before. Death is vitally necessary, Ramona realizes, to let the living go on. Ramona's natural acceptance-and, by extension, ours-of the intrusion and integration of the quick and the dead as normal equalizes the supernatural elements with the worldly ones. Strongly reminiscent of the magic realism of Garcia Marquez, this is an enchanting work by a new writer.
Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, Ohio.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.