Jazmina Barrera's THE QUEEN OF SWORDS (Tr Christina Mac Sweeney)

The Queen of Swords, Jazmina Barrera's fascinating and unusual study of Mexican literary icon Elena Garro, might get shelved among the literary biographies in the rare and special kind of bookstore that will even bother to stock such a thing, as a rule, but The Queen of Swords is about as much a biography as Orson Welles' incredible F for Fake is a documentary. Which is to say both "kind of" and "not at all.*"

Furthermore, in arguing for the "kind of" side I would have to invoke the parallel or tandem biography, like Charlotte Gordon's Romantic Outlaws, which simultaneously studies Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, while also giving considerable time to each Mary's equally-if-not-more famous husbands. Elena Garro's daughter is nowhere near as big a presence in QoS as Elena herself, but the child's father, Elena's famous husband Octavio Paz, takes up the space that Helenita doesn't, while Barrera's surprisingly entertaining experiences of researching and writing the book also shares the space, kind of the way some of Orson Welles' hijinks round out F for Fake. 

Moreover, both projects are complete delights, marred only by their (by modern standards) brevity -- though by saying they're "marred" implies that this is a flaw when it only really highlights the fact that they left me wanting much, much more.**

But there's no equivalent, in QoS, to the famous Chartes sequence in FfF. Barrera's work is much too intimate and personal to yield a big meditation on art and history and architecture. And Garro's life was a lot more harrowing than Welles'; several times she and her daughter were fleeing entire countries ahead of assassins, possibly vindictive ex-lovers, political authorities and penury. And Barrera has only the medium of text to convey all of this. But what text she has!

What we conserve of the dead is, above all, images and words: in that they are similar to books. We might even make the mistake of confusing the two, but no life fits in a single book. It would need several trunks, whole libraries, university and press archives to hold the vast, elusive life of Elena Garro, and what I write here doesn't aspire to that. It doesn't pretend to have the last word on anything or anybody. This isn't a biography, it's scarcely a notebook. It is a collection of stories, ideas, facts, and cats.

Garro was a woman who deeply loved the idea, if not the fact, of divinatory arts like the I Ching and the Tarot -- hence the incredible cover Two Lines Press generated for the English language edition of QoS, which takes the same iconic photo of Garro that graces the original and abstracts it into a version of a card of the Minor Arcana. Amusingly, the text itself is divided into very short chapters, some only a sentence or two long, each with a pithy title that could almost be the name of one of the Major Arcana, like "THE CRIME OF FANTASY" or "PERFUME," such that I had a working theory while reading the book that there was one chapter for each card in the Tarot. Alas, when I actually sat down to count the chapter-ettes, I got far more than the expected 78. It was still a fun theory, and while I have zero evidence that this idea was ever part of Barrera's plan for QoS, I respect that if it was, such a gimmick was not allowed to govern the presentation. Barrera's short, specific chapters (which, further arguing against the idea that this is in any way a biography, are not remotely chronological; they are firmly grouped by ideas according to a scheme that I couldn't really parse out but didn't really try because the text is far more interesting than the structure), which quote liberally from Garro's own works and those of her contemporaries, also present the reader with a pleasing run of meta-knowledge in the form of marginalia clearly identifying the precise source for its quotations, a technique I find that I much prefer to footnotes or endnotes and one that I wouldn't mind seeing catch on with other writers who are bridging the gulf between the scholarly work of formal criticism and the popular biographical one.

I've dreamed of Elena Garro a number of times and almost all those dreams have left me with brief, inconclusive pictures: a blurred image of Elena standing up, wearing a coffeee-colored, tailored suit; Elena Garro and Bioy Casares laughing at something awful, with Octavio Paz looking worried. I once dreamed that Elena entered a worm spiral of time and space that carried her from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Another night, I dreamed that Elena and Helenita were Lorelai and Rory from the television series Gilmore Girls.

Elena Garro is a brand new discovery for me. I had of course heard of her husband, who won the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature, but, to be honest, Latin American, and especially Mexican, literature is still a bit of a blind spot for me. I have read more fiction translated from various dialects of Arabic than I have from Spanish, more from the Austrian Hapsburg empire than from Spain's. Ernest Hogan, Alejandro Morales, Rudy Ch. Garcia, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (does she count since she's actually a Canadian citizen?)... so I've read some weird fiction from Mexico, sure, but not any literary or mainstream stuff... and then I find that Elena Garro is at least as responsible as more familiar-to-me creators like Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the development of Magical Realism, especially in its stricter definition in which the source for the magical is Indigenous folk legend and belief***. But so anyway, I came into QoS as cold as cold could be, and leave it now determined to make up for lost time with Elena Garro. How fortunate, therefore, that my brand shiny new subscription/membership to the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines Press brought me, not only QoS, but also The Week of Colors, a collection of Garro's short fiction originally published in 1964 and newly translated into English by Megan McDowell. It's like these people want to make it easy for me to fall in love, or something.

I will probably never love Garro as much as Jazmina Barrera does, though. As she shares in the course of the book, QoS started out as an essay for a journal, but as Barrera, whose own great-grandparents were friends of Garro and Paz, got access to loads of archival material and re-read Garro's works for the umpteenth time, her love became all consuming until the project swallowed up all of her time and effort and became this wonderful book. I'm grateful for this love and for the fact that it is still possible, at least for a very few of us, for people with a passion to pursue it fully and come out with something this terrific to show for it. Let's hear it for adventurous editors, curious scholars, and prolific playwrights/poets/novelists. This world would sure suck without them.

*And if I had to compare it to anything besides FfF, it would have to be to something like Michel Houellebecq's "literary mash note" H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, though QoS has an entirely different tone.

**And just as FfF led me down multiple rabbit holes of wrong and crazy awesome about Elmyr de Heury and Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes, well, let's just say that I'm already falling past the levitating rocking chairs and apothecary shelves and bookcases on my way down to exploring Elena Garro's (and friends') literary wonderland, starting with a newly released translation of Garro's The Week of Colors published in tandem with QoS, just to make sure I did so.

***And in these pages I learned that one of the many reasons why authority figures of various kinds did not appreciate the treasure they had in Elena Garro was her consistent and lifelong support of Indigenous rights (and, of course, her very vocal and active support of revolutionaries in general), entitling Garro to even more of my admiration than her literary output already demands.