Synopsis
A group of American expatriates settles in a quiet Mexican town, where they enjoy spacious adobe houses and the tolerance of the natives. By the author of Stones for Ibarra. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo.
Reviews
"Three North American women, aged thirty-two, forty-two and eighty-three, sit, each alone, trying to remember love." In Doerr's (Stones for Ibarra) exquisitely nuanced, elegant and wise second novel set in a little village in Mexico, the characters have briefly left the world to ponder their uncertain futures. Artist Sue Ames impulsively buys 10 acres of land in Amapola with another American, shady speculator Bud Loomis. She is fleeing a disappointing marriage to a man whose mercurial ways have tried her soul. Twice-divorced travel-writer Fran Bowles builds a house on the subdivided land to provide a haven for her latest lover--who is destined to leave her. Ursula, Fran's mother, has come back to Mexico, where she was born, to die. She is the most elegantly realized character, and the one with whom one suspects Doerr most empathizes. Living with the aching memory of conjugal love and the knowledge of imminent death, Ursula searches for the meaning of existence in "the brilliant patchwork of her never-ending past," recalled in poignant memories and crowned by a sentimental tribute to a beloved figure of her youth. In 10 chapters whose vignettes have the vividness of dreams, Doerr creates portraits of the gentle, desperately poor residents of Amapola and the courtly aristocrat Don Enrique Ortiz, who protectively observes the buyers of his ancestral estate. She paints the Mexican setting like a mural: verdant gardens, a parched plain, village houses vibrantly painted the colors of fruit, the "azure sprawl" of morning glories clambering over tombstones. In spare, lapidary prose, she evokes heat, dust and drought; drenching rain; the clarity of light; the radiance of the air; the smell of jasmine, and of rot. She observes with irony the ways in which people of different cultures exist in mutual, courteous misunderstanding. But most of all she delicately celebrates the persistence and endurance of past experience, knit by memory into the fabric of life.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the author of the American Book Award-winning Stones for Ibarra (1984): a novel that limns in lapidary prose a story of loss and renewal in a small Mexican village--a town transformed by Americans inadvertently ``into something more beautiful than it is.'' As in an old morality fable--without the moralizing--Doerr tells of four expatriates driven to seek refuge in a place so unfamiliar that its ``otherness'' will be the catalyst that restores them. When ``two irresolute Americans'' arrive in tiny Amapolas, set in the midst of a barren mesa, and together buy ten acres from the local grandee, the villagers observe them with curiosity and tolerance. But recently divorced artist Sue Ames and her unlikely business partner, Bud Loomis (on the run from the Arizona tax authorities), have different reasons for making the purchase: Sue hopes to live there forever, and Bud wants to restore his finances. Realizing, though, that they can't afford their houses unless they subdivide the land, they sell plots to the 79- year-old Ursula Bowles, a recent widow, who was born in Mexico and now wants to regain ``the brilliant patchwork of her never-ending past,'' and her twice-divorced daughter, Fran, who wants a house so that her Mexican lover can visit her. Over a period of five years, houses are built; droughts take their toll; locals in the Americans' employ prosper; and the four Americans begin to change: Sue realizes that she'd been too hasty in divorcing her husband; the now-dying Ursula accepts the loss of life and love (``an individual life is in the end nothing more than a stirring of air''); Fran, abandoned by her glamorous lover, meets a homely but dependable archaeologist; and Bud pays back his taxes and becomes a local benefactor. Wisdom and happiness prevail. A beautifully rendered novel in which the happy endings are more eloquent epiphanies than facile plot wrap-ups--and a second novel well worth the wait. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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