BookBrowse Reviews The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

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A redemption tale set across eras, exploring how a family can atone for its own atrocities in a world where they're perpetrated on all sides.

Is a son responsible for the sins of his father? Is it possible to escape your family's legacy, and can one ever truly right the wrongs of the past? Through evocative text and looping timelines, The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James asks readers these questions in the form of a redemption story that is frightening and fulfilling in equal measure.

The Bullet Swallower is a tale of a cursed family, the Sonoros, who are responsible for all manner of evil deeds over the span of centuries. It centers on Antonio Sonoro, El Tragabalas ("the bullet swallower"), who is loosely based on the author's great-grandfather, and Jaime Sonoro, the fictional Antonio's grandson.

Antonio's story takes place in the mid-1890s when, as a drinker and gambler, barely eking out a living for his family in rural Mexico, he goes for a major score via a train robbery in southern Texas. The heist fails, and in the melee his brother is killed by the Texas Rangers, while Antonio himself suffers a grievous wound that results in his menacing nickname. His brother's death sends him on a quest for vengeance across dusty Texas plains and sun-baked Mexican deserts, crisscrossing the Rio Grande while pursuing the killers and avoiding a similar fate for himself.

Interspersed with Antonio's storyline is that of Jaime, a popular Mexican actor in the mid-1960s. He knows nothing of his family's past until he finds a strange book chronicling their entire sordid history. As the author hops back and forth between these stories, a shadowy figure hangs over both characters and draws the thread between their tales.

Antonio's adventures are part spaghetti Western and part Don Quixote, with a dash of magical realism mixed in. He faces impossible odds in shoot-out after shoot-out as he chases his tormentors, the Texas Rangers (see Beyond the Book), and fixates on his own version of Dulcinea, his long-suffering wife, Jesusa.

He even has his Sancho Panza — an aristocratic English sidekick named Peter, who happens to be a perfect shot. This character feels a little too improbable in the rural borderlands between Mexico and the U.S. in 1895, but his consistently cheerful dialogue and sunny disposition — in contrast to Antonio's pathos — bring much-needed levity to the narrative.

Both hunter and hunted, Antonio's quest pulls him through Wild West towns, barren landscapes and ominous bodies of water described in dreamlike tones, with pictures and coloring muted and unclear, then suddenly fiery and up close: "the black shore twisted with vines and mesquite trees, fallen limbs that reached out of the water like hands. The scream came again and this time Antonio saw the white body of a barn owl stark against the night sky." Wherever Antonio goes, colonial aggression, poverty and mistreatment of Mexican citizens are plain to see.

Meanwhile, as he learns more about his family's past, Jaime becomes enveloped by the curse of the Sonoros. The shadowy figure, Remedio, appears as a guest in Jaime's home and seems to bring misfortune with him, but his role in the Sonoros's fate is unclear. Is he causing the curse? Protecting them from it? Gonzalez James doesn't answer those questions, but Remedio's arrival leads Jaime to understand he must tell the story of El Tragabalas to absolve not just his grandfather, but himself and his entire family.

Despite the cruelty and discrimination that both Antonio and Jaime see all around them, they learn to make sacrifices for the greater good. The resolution is a relief — the reader can feel the family's burden being lifted — but Gonzalez James is wise enough not to sugarcoat the ending or cast anyone as a simplistic hero.

The Bullet Swallower is magical realism lite — a good introduction before a reader jumps into something like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, for example. It leaves one with a lingering sense of foreboding and questions about what was real and what was imagined. Gonzales James's leaps of logic are just fantastical enough without becoming completely untethered from her story's historical settings.

Aside from the elements of fantasy, however, the novel closes with a sense of cautious hope that we actually can overcome even the worst legacies, and perhaps leave this world just a little better than we found it.

This review first ran in the March 6, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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