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A Novel
by Yuri Herrera
Book Reviewed by:A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of Signs Preceding the End of the World.
New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.
Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez's time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera's fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.
ONE
The badges dragged the man from the ship, hurled him down the gangplank, and he fell in front of them and then attempted to stand, but the badges conquered him with clubs and he didn't defend himself from their blows, because his hands were clasping a treasured object to his chest. One of the badges torturing him said Drop it. They didn't speak the language, but that's what the badge was saying. Drop it! shouted the one who seemed to be the boss, and then he insulted the man; they didn't recognize the word but they recognized the language of hate. But the man did not drop it, not until three badges wrenched one arm and three wrenched the other, and the object fell to the ground and popped open, and the boss picked it up, and though he'd no doubt held objects like this one before, he was astonished to see that it was a compass.
In that frozen moment in which the badges looked at the boss and the boss looked at the compass and the man looked at the boss holding the compass and nobody ...
Benito allows himself to be drawn into the chaos of New Orleans and the lives of the people he meets... A major theme of the novel is the failure or refusal to acknowledge the harm that one perpetrates; this is seen not only in Benito but in minor characters as well, such as the slave trader who insists that, as only the middleman, he is not responsible for the suffering he causes. As the book goes on, Benito repeatedly realizes that, despite his genuine empathy, he has missed the extent of people's suffering or misunderstood the nuances of their lives...continued
Full Review
(690 words)
(Reviewed by Katharine Blatchford).
Paul Yoon, author of The Hive and the Honey
The always thrilling and always remarkable Yuri Herrera has outdone himself here: Reading Season of the Swamp is like being thrown into deep water only to open your eyes and find a haunting and haunted world, one full of magic and beauty, exiles and outsiders, longing and song. I didn't want to surface―here I am still, in its great, brilliant light.
In his novel Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera illuminates the year and a half Benito Juárez spent as a political exile in New Orleans, an often-overlooked period in the life of Mexico's first Indigenous president.
Juárez was born in 1806 to a Zapotec family living in the town of San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca, Mexico. He was orphaned at a young age, after which he was raised by his uncle and attended a local seminary school. Later, he earned a law degree from the Institute of Arts and Sciences of Oaxaca, the first student from that school to do so. He entered politics by running for and winning a position on his municipal council as a member of the Liberal Party, which aimed to expand civil rights and religious freedom in ...
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