Zoraida Córdova's THE INHERITANCE OF ORQUÍDEA DIVINA

"What is it?" he asked. "And don't say nothing because you look like you've seen a ghost and we've seen too many fucking ghosts to be scared of them."

At what point does Magical Realism cross over into fantasy, genre-wise? A lot of people trot out the former term whenever they're dealing with supernatural literature that has been written by and/or about LatinX people, but for me that term is more subtle than that. You can't just ignore the realism in Magical Realism; the adjective "magical" is a modifier of the noun that follows it. Magic, spells, the undead, afterlife, etc are elements of more than the whole driver of the story. Grace notes, maybe, or that pinch of salt. The story is fine without them, but just enough makes the rest of the ingredients (usually, in my experience, quality social drama and/or historical fiction) really stand out.

I've seen The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina called Magical Realism, but I'd argue that what Zoraida Córdova has created for us here is fantasy. Which is just fine with me, thank you, because it's neither Epic nor Urban; it might be called historical fantasy, but really, it's its own thing. The magical elements aren't just an expressionist touch or a metaphor, but rather fully as important and integral to the tale of the Equadorean-American Montoya clan as its exploration of their founding matriarch's journey from unwanted "bastard daughter of the waves" to a seemingly omnipotent bruja in the process of metamorphosing into a tree.

Said matriarch, the titular Orquídea, was born in Ecuador to an unwed mother who had a fling with a sailor who disappeared after Orquídea was conceived. Mother and daughter have a hardscrabble life in the city in the early 20th century until Orquídea kind of accidentally catches mom a husband, on the advice of a petite crocodilian river monster who is the little girl's only friend and with whom she has made a deal to always share half of her catch of fish in return for the river montster's agreement to stop interfering with same. Did I mention that the magic is absolutely integral to the story? Because it is. Orquídea's life is brimful of magic even before she grows up, turns up in the United States in a place called Four Rivers, and brings the valley there back to life from barrenness, turning it into a lush and fertile garden of a place complete with a beautiful house that magically appears on the land overnight, along with the proper documentation to prove that Orquídea is the legal owner of said valley. But that's much later in her life, though it's the first thing that happens in the novel. Orquídea has to have a place to which to summon her numerous children (by four different husbands) and grandchildren to accept their inheritance from her and get the modern day plot going, after all.

The novel thus tells two parallel stories, of Orquídea's childhood (in which she gets to play Cinderella for her mother, new stepfather and a passel of half-siblings in addition to catching a lot of fish and befriending a river monster) and of several of her grandchildren's journey to Four Rivers from New York City, Oregon and other far-flung locales to which they moved when Orquídea banished them all from their idyllic childhood home, for reasons she didn't bother explaining. Their homecoming is bittersweet; Orquídea is fascinating and charming and beautiful, even as an elderly woman, but she's got so many secrets she can seem cold and inhospitable. How is she so powerful? Why is she so secretive? And what is she bequeathing to her descendants?

We find out at a leisurely pace that lets us get to know the three most important (story-wise) of her grandchildren, cousins Marimar, Reymundo and Tatinelly, each the child of a different one of Orquídea's children, with Marimar and Reymundo being orphaned before adulthood, their parents dying tragically young due to a mysterious curse on the family that Orquídea has always hinted about but never explained. As they gather in adulthood in answer to Orquídea's summons, Marimar and Reymundo are both feeling lost and somewhat wayward, while Tatinelly is very happily married to a guy named Mike Sullivan and expecting their first child very soon. And yes, Chekov's baby gets born on the dramatic night that really gets the dual plots in gear, and yes that child, Rhiannon, winds up being magical AF when the dramatic night's events leave Marimar, Reymundo and Rhiannon with rosebuds growing from the base of Marimar's throat, one of Reymundo's hands, and baby Rhiannon's forehead! This after they've seen the ghosts mentioned above, of course: Orquídea's four husbands and all of the adult children who have since died and been buried with the husbands in the family graveyard on Orquídea's land, and Orquídea, well, I mentioned the tree already.

It's then left to the cousins to sift through a tiny store of clues Orquídea has left behind about her remarkable life before she created the idyllic valley at Four Rivers. As the mystery deepens, so does the sense of responsibility that Marimar and Reymundo feel for each other and the rest of their family, even their unpleasant uncle Enrique and Orquídea's long-lost half-siblings (who only get one scene in the novel but do their very best to channel Lobelia Sackville-Baggins despite there being no silver spoons). There is lots more magic, more than a little romance, some first-rate scenery porn, and enchantment aplenty. 

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, then, is one of those books that most confound what I want out of reading: it's impossible to put down and thus impossible to prolong as a read, and at the same time one I was very sad to see end, even if very satisfyingly. I've never had much of an urge to read the author's Brooklyn Bruja novels, as for me a little witchy goes a long way, but I might be persuaded to change my mind if they're as lovely, engaging and affecting as this one. Go see for yourself!

Isabel Allende's VIOLETA (tr by Francis Riddle)

It's not hard to make me cry these days -- one of the many reasons I've pretty much stopped watching television is that I bawl uncontrollably, even at commercials, so we won't even talk about sporting events or scripted dramas like Call the Midwife.* Or, say, The Expanse, which, we all know the last time a book made me cry; it wasn't that long ago, was it?

Sometimes our fates take turns that we don't notice in the moment they occur, but if you live as long as I have they become clear in hindsight. At each crossroads or fork we must decide which direction to take. These decisions may determine the course of the rest of our lives. That's what happened to me the day I recovered Torito's cross.

So it should come as no surprise that I've spent the last few days peering at my ebook reader through a film of tears, because I've been reading Isabel Allende, a writer whom I haven't read since I had to read her debut novel for a class in college, long before my cry-at-everything problem surfaced in my life, but yeah, I cried then, too. So I should have been prepared for Violeta.

The passage I quoted above occurs quite late in the novel and wasn't the first bit that elicited the waterworks, but it's the most important to the plot, so I'm going to talk about it and yeah, you guys don't pay attention to the tagline on this blog anymore so spoilers except, of course, this being historical fiction, history itself is the greatest spoiler of them all.

The title character, Violeta, is a member of the same clan readers first encountered in Allende's first novel House of the Spirits(which I read for a class in college when it was still pretty new), whose life spans an entire century in her native land (a never-named Chile but come on, it's obviously Chile) with excursions to the United States and to Europe over the course of an extraordinary life that begins in the Great Depression with her family's fall from upper class splendor to living off the charity of the kindly back-of-beyond family of Violete's governess' lover Teresa, continues through a tepid marriage to a German veterinarian that brings her within a whisker of getting involved in a fictionalized Colonia Dignidad, a scorching love affair with a dashing criminal pilot with ties to all of the right-wing evil that South America and the United States have to offer (and it is he who fathers her two children and madly complicates her life for decades while she is still technically married to the German), a nice one with the guy whom she originally meets when her criminal lover hires him to keep track of their wayward daughter in 1960s Las Vegas, and finally a delightful autumnal relationship with a Norwegian diplomat and bird watcher.

The love of her life, though, as we are told early on, is someone named Camilio, whose actual relationship to her is kept secret until quite late; two other men loom large and protective and helpful in her life in the form of her brother, Jose Antonio, and the Torito mentioned in the passage I quoted above. Her brother shares his business acumen with her early on in life, allowing her to develop a powerful skill set that lets her support herself as an independent woman in a time and place when that was a unicorn; Torito is a family retainer whom she has always known, something of a father figure, not conventionally intelligent or intellecutal and huge, so commonly thought of as developmentally disabled (the novel uses the R word), who comes through for her at a desperate time and pays the ultimate price for it.

I have defined Violeta so far through her relationships with men, but there are also incredible women in her life, starting with her Irish governess, who comes to her as a nanny dressed like a flapper in the 1920s, young and pretty but already damaged by a devastating past as an orphan girl in Ireland but determined not to let that stop her; her relationship with another woman, the aforementioned Teresa, not only governs the early course of Violeta's life as the source of her family's refuge after their fall in the Great Depression, but also involves them all in radical politics from the movement for women's suffrage through the election of Chile's first Socialist president and the sweeping reforms that were utimately his downfall.

In addition to the governess are two extraordinary maiden aunts, a pair of itinerant schoolteachers who train up Violeta to maybe someday join their ranks, a cook who becomes her family's link to the indigenous population in the south of the nation, and so many more. If a character gets a name, they get a full story, relayed in intimate, chatty detail by narrator Violeta, who is recounting the whole of her life  and her evolution from spoiled only daughter of a rich family to wayward wife of a German immigrant to conservative, self-supporting savvy businesswoman to radical founder of a social justice organization that looks poised to outlive her -- all for the benefit of her beloved Camilio.

All this means that, yes, Violeta lives through the brutal military dictatorship led by Pinochet. At first she doesn't think it's going to be so bad -- she has thriving businesses, plenty of money, and government contracts that look like they're going to be honored -- and her awakening to the actual nature of the right-wing dictatorship that takes over her country, the finding of a wooden cruxifix she carved as a little girl for her big, strange friend Torito, is sudden, shocking and emotionally wrenching -- and absolutely organic. Allende was great back in the 1980s and has only gotten better, so fluid and natural now that I don't even notice her, which I can also say for translator Francis Riddle.

I mean it as a tremendous compliment to observe that I didn't notice either of them as I was absorbed completely into the story. And crying.

*To name a show that all of the women in my life love passionately and honestly, I don't know how they do it. Every damned episode I've seen has left me sobbing uncontrollably for, like, days? And I have enough to cry about in real life? But there you go. God damn that show.