BookBrowse Reviews Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera

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Benito Juárez, exiled from his home in Mexico, is pulled into the tumultuous world of 19th century New Orleans.

Though he will go on to become President, reformer, and national hero of Mexico, in 1853 Benito Juárez has just been sent into exile by the dictator Santa Anna, along with many of his liberal allies. He arrives in New Orleans on the 29th of December. Yuri Herrera's novel Season of the Swamp meets him stepping off the ship and goes on to imagine what he might have faced in this little-known, eighteen month-long period of his life.

Despite his mounting frustrations over his separation from his family and inability to affect the situation in Mexico, Benito allows himself to be drawn into the chaos of New Orleans and the lives of the people he meets. He and his allies encounter con artists and financial trouble, taking on odd jobs and sharing cheap rooms to make ends meet; indulge in the revelry of Mardi Gras; suffer through yellow fever; and attempt to help people fleeing slavery. Herrera's portrayal of 19th century New Orleans is incredibly rich—the city is in turn beautiful, horrific, and simply absurd. Benito is fascinated by the variety of music and dancers, then repelled by the filth and casual violence he witnesses. When summer arrives, the reader can almost feel "the heat become the hot."

The characters are as vivid and contradictory as the setting. A woman named Thisbee is the only person to smile at the exiles when they arrive; she clearly likes Benito but just as clearly doesn't trust him. Borrego, a doctor and criminal, makes it clear he's willing to sell them out for a decent reward, but also gives Benito quinine free of charge, just in case he needs it.

Often these contradictions involve the cruelty of the ongoing slave trade, which is deeply enmeshed in the city and the lives of its denizens. 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. And yet the novel's focus is not solely on the cruelty and indifference in the city. Benito only survives due to people's willingness to help, if only in small ways, and he spends the book doing his best to help others in turn.

Herrera immerses the reader in Benito's point of view, often in a stream of consciousness mode, as when he describes one of the jobs Benito takes rolling cigars:

"The days after that had been a foray into his hands, into what they were learning to do, into how they hurt, into their color and the color of the tobacco, into the smell of the tobacco, which became the smell of his hands, into the whole arduous hustle that was coming to fruition…"

Herrera also plays with formatting, occasionally using punctuation, line breaks, font, or type size to emphasize phrases or set a tone. In one scene, for example, Benito tries absinthe, after which the rest of the sentence is broken into seven lines, each only two words long. This style adds an element of fascinating surrealism to a story rooted in history and real-world concerns.

Readers who prefer plot driven stories may find Season of the Swamp unsatisfying; while the events of the book affect the characters deeply, in many ways it feels like an interlude in Benito's story. Many of the key events in the story, in fact, happen to other characters, with Benito playing a relatively minor role or simply observing. The focus of the novel is on Benito's responses to his experiences, and how his views are changed, rather than on what he actually does—a structure that expertly emphasizes his status as an exile, disconnected from the home that means so much to him and undergoing a transitional period, and cements Season of the Swamp as a must-read for fans of character-driven historical fiction.

This review first ran in the October 2, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.