At first the book worried me and angered me. Do they still treat people that way in the jails of Mexico? It was pretty ugly. I wondered if the book reflected current or past conditions.
"Oh, past!" I was told. Remember, it's a novel.
Well, the book was published in 2000. Not really so long ago, in my lifetime.... The narrator recounts when he and the Mayan leader, one of the men in the cell, had looked up the Mayan prophecy of the world ending in 2012. He said they would have been 43 when that happened, and they expected to die. That reminds me of when I was a little girl and wanted to know If I'd see 2000. I calculated that I would be over 40, so, yes, I'd probably be alive, but at that age, who cared. That must have been how the young Mayan men felt. That meant they were born in 1957. Right?
Andres Chay became the president of the Mayan village of Sac May when he was 26 years old. That would have been in 1983, right? I looked up Cancho Puerto, who was supposed to have been governor of the Yucatan at that time. Ah that's a made-up name. Cancho Puerto . No hints there. It is a novel, after all. So it could have been anytime between 1983 and 2000. Seventeen years. I don't know when Earl Shorris meant for the novel to be set. And he died last year. I can't even ask him. I'd also like to ask him how much truth is in the novel.
It follows an American attorney through over thirty six days of a hunger strike. Do you know the stages of starvation? It's pretty grim, but it's a journey.
I started out angry, but I was drawn into the relationship between the two strike leaders, and even the relationship with the jailers. Everyone knew someone had to die.....
But the biggest mystery is the narrator. You get many hints but no real answers.
And another mystery is what I'll do with what I've learned reading this book. And how I will live down there, knowing that the reason I can retire in comfort is because so many live in despair and poverty.
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