Tag 1950s

A woman with black hair, wearing an off the should red gown, holds bunch of flowers while standing in front of a green floral wallpaper.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Kristen B. 1 Comment
A woman with black hair, wearing an off the should red gown, holds bunch of flowers while standing in front of a green floral wallpaper.

by Kristen B.

Horrifyingly creepy. Creepily horrifying. Either way, it’s gothic. The author tells you right there in the title. I’m not a big fan of horror – gothic or otherwise. You can keep your atmospheric creepies to yourself.

This book absorbed me. I literally could not put it down.

Noemi Taboada is my kind of girl: smart and sassy. She’s contemplating an advanced degree in anthropology, if only she can convince her father that there’s more to a well-off woman’s life than marriage and family. In Mexico in the 1950s, this is a harder sell than it should be. She’s also something of a party girl, who enjoys dancing and smoking with her active social circle.

Her cousin Catalina, though, is cut from more traditional cloth. She is married and has moved to her new husband’s remote estate, away from the family in Mexico City. When the family receives troubling letters from and about Catalina, Noemi agrees to her father’s plan to visit her cousin and investigate the situation.

Catalina has married Virgil Doyle, oldest son of a family that immigrated to Mexico generations ago but have maintained an English sensibility, including not speaking Spanish. They came for the silver mines and stayed for reasons that become clear later. The house (in all honestly, a sinister mansion) is dark – literally with drapes pulled and limited electricity – decorated with overwrought furnishings in a variety of mythological motifs and loaded with tarnished silver. Gothic oozes out of the story’s rotting wainscoting.

Noemi is not a particularly welcome visitor. She smokes. She asks questions. She’s not particularly interested in being obedient to the Doyles’ odd rules. She wants to see her cousin. She visits town. She roams the family’s cemetery where she befriends younger cousin Francis, who helps her understand that not all is right or well at High Place – and not just because the family’s fortunes are dwindling with the mines being closed.

Francis has a fascination with fungus. Mushrooms are his main interest, and I don’t want to spoil too much – but it’s relevant. He also seems to spend plenty of time outdoors to get away from his overbearing family: Virgil who reeks of ambition and charisma but codes as emotionally abusive, and Florence, the strict maiden aunt who is the enforcer for Howard, the ailing patriarch with a keen interest in eugenics. Honestly, I’d spend as much time outside as I could, too.

Noemi’s questions reveal that the Doyle family has all sorts of secrets and scandals, including murder and incest. Things start to fall into place just as Noemi begins to demonstrate the same sort of worrisome symptoms as her cousin Catalina. Noemi’s vivid dream sequences contribute to the sense of impending doom and overall wrongness. When Howard and Florence forcibly insist that Noemi marry Francis, it all comes apart at the seams and a nightmare of truly gothic proportions ensues. The author fully embraces Latin magical realism as she dives into the deep end of the horror genre.

You should read it, preferably on a dank, rainy day in a spider-infested garret. Personally, I am glad I read it on a hot, summer day next to a window while traveling on a train. Mexican Gothic is available in print, ebook, and eaudiobook.

Kristen B. is a devoted bookworm lucky enough to work as the graphic designer for HCLS. She likes to read, stitch, dance, and watch baseball (but not all at the same time).

A black and white photo shows James Baldwin sits at a table gesturing with one hand with a coffee pot and glasses in front of him.

Another Country

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The Penguin Classic cover features red cut-outs of figures layered over a neutral background.
Penguin Classic edition

by Ben H.

“Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen – for the weight of this city was murderous” 

James Baldwin

Another Country is a novel that’s more like a play or a poem. Short descriptions set scenes like flashes of light, and dialogue propels us through the story. James Baldwin is brilliant and empathetic; his depiction of humanity is beautiful. Passages that make you weep are followed immediately by passages that make you laugh. Dark episodes in the cold rain follow erotic passages in warm apartments. Baldwin’s relentless prose attack zigs and zags at the reader, and he never lets up. He pulls the threads of the tangled ball of relationships at the center of the novel tighter and tighter. Another Country is addictive and almost unbearably tense. 

Baldwin explores race, gender, sexuality, religion, art, and life in America in the 1950s through the interactions of a group of memorable characters. First, we meet Rufus Scott, a black jazz drummer, stumbling out of a movie theater in New York, disheveled and desperate. His experience as a black man in America is really the central pillar of the story. His wretched love/hate relationship with Leona, a white woman from the south, ruins both of their lives and sets a grim tone for a serious book. Vivaldo, a white man, is arguably the main character. Vivaldo is a struggling writer and Rufus’ best friend. Vivaldo is everywhere. He felt to me like a stand-in for James Baldwin himself.

France offers the reader a brief respite from the grimness of New York. We first meet Eric and his boyfriend Yves on a French beach. The passages set abroad are lovely and warm, while the scenes in New York are often brutal and freezing or unforgiving and sizzling. Baldwin’s depiction of France juxtaposed with that of America neatly illustrates the way Baldwin, a gay black man, felt in France versus the way he felt in the United States.

The many protagonists provide a narrative richness I really loved. Besides Rufus and Vivaldo, Cass (maybe my favorite character), Ida (Rufus’s sister and an incredible character), and Eric (in his own way the heartbeat of the book) are the other main players in this story of relationships and race. The New York Times compared Another Country to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and I think it’s a great comparison. Baldwin also brings the furious pace of a sax solo to his poetic novel. If you want to know what it’s like to read Another Country, listen to “Countdown” off of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.

Another Country really does have a momentous heft to it. Baldwin, like an alchemical wordsmith, achieved something magical with everyday material. On the surface, it’s just the story of a few overlapping relationships during the 50s. But by the time you turn the last page, it feels like you’re holding something vital in your hands. I really do believe that books like this can change the way people view and treat one another.

If you’ve already read Another Country, visit HCLS and see if we have a Baldwin that you haven’t yet read (or if we can recommend something similar). If you haven’t read Another Country, you have money in the bank. You can’t go wrong with Mr. Baldwin.

Ben Hamilton works at Project Literacy, Howard County Library’s adult basic education initiative, based at HCLS Central Branch. He loves reading, writing, walking, and talking (all the basics).