Swift as Desire by Laura Esquivel

Abstract

B o o k R ev iew s 5 0 7 Swift as Desire. By Laura Esquivel. New York: Crown Publishing, 2001. 208 pages, $22.00. Reviewed by Carey Ellen Emmons Utah State University, Logan In yet another unconventionally metaphysical fulfillment of E. M. Forster’s aphorism “only connect,” Laura Esquivel’s third novel Swift as Desire offers us an expanded consciousness similar to the sharing of food in like Water for Chocolate (1993) and the technological “connections” in The Law of Love (1996). This time, her protagonist learns to understand his loved ones and the universe around him through his telepathic gifts that are analogous only to telegraph transmissions, a tribute to Esquivel’s father, a lifelong telegraph operator. In this story, Júbilo, the youngest of twelve children bom to a Spanish mother and a Mayan father, is bom into the contention that resides in Mexico between the Spanish and the indigenous, new and old, technological and spiri­ tual. But Júbilo is bom with a special gift of recognizing the true intentions and identities of all around him, including the inanimate world. This gift is first real­ ized as Júbilo is positioned as a translator between his Spanish-speaking mother and his Mayan-speaking paternal grandmother. In this role he quickly learns the conciliatory skill of translating the women’s unexpressed feelings rather than their actual words: “[T]he important thing wasn’t what was said, but the inten­ tion behind the communication. . . . And he understood that this ‘voice’ that remained silent was the one that truly represented his grandmother’s desires” (15). In this way, Júbilo becomes the reconciler between opposing ideas. This clairvoyant gift is further realized and enhanced as Júbilo takes on the task of learning and deciphering Mayan numerology in order to retain the past. Júbilo believed that each number had “a distinct way of resonating” and like all other incommunicable truths to which Júbilo is privy, they “spoke to him” (43, 38). These experiences prepare him to be an adept telegraph operator as well as a perceptive lover to his wife Lucha. When Júbilo marries Lucha, his sweetheart of seven years, he learns to lis­ ten to the pulses of Lucha’s body and understand her soul the same as he has done with words in telegraph transmission. But when, to Júbilos dismay, his gift of translation fails him, a seemingly irreparable gap forges its way into their love and marriage that can only be resolved through the future efforts of their then unborn daughter, Lluvia. Years later, when Parkinson’s disease has left Júbilo bedridden and unable to speak, Lluvia, now his caretaker, goes in search of a telegraph transmitter in order to reopen communication between her father and those who love him. This begins an entirely new form of communication between her and her father. Despite having inherited her grandmother’s distastes for technology, Lluvia now faces the same challenge as her father, learning to “listen to his silence to find the answers” to the family secret that has for so long divided husband and wife (66). 5 0 8 WAL 3 7 . 4 WINTER 2 0 0 3 As Lluvia, whose name means rain, begins to learn the pulses of the transmitter and their correlating words, technology puts her on track to a spiritual world so important to Jubilo and his grandmother. She becomes the conduit for not only the rejuvenated love between her mother and father, but also for the reunion of spirituality and technology, past and future. Wild Life: A Novel. By Molly Gloss. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. 255 pages, $13.00. Reviewed by Jennifer Love Lane Community College, Eugene, Oregon Like many who write of landscape and place, and like some of the charac­ ters in her own fiction, Charlotte Bridger Drummond takes to the woods. The narrator and protagonist of Molly Gloss’s novel Wild Life, Charlotte is a feminist and author living in southwestern Washington during the first decade of the twentieth century. A single mother of young children, Charlotte is a self-sup­ porting writer and self-conscious free-thinker, who prefers her writing...