The small, unrelated acts of violence occur within a month in a
Mexican village to which the boy descends, down mountain paths, his
father's body strapped to his back. He had killed him when drunk.
The President, ill and weary of such sad, recurrent duties, must
put him in jail. Each chapter takes its focus from one of the
characters - from Mario, the Indian who is the doctor's aide but
who calls the drunkard-curer for his sick father; from the
President who finally dies; from the teacher, the Maestro, almost
resigned to the hopelessness of life in this backwater; from the
arrogant Juan Lopez Oso, the president's successor; etc. Wilson,
unlike many first novelists, excludes himself from the story and
whatever he saw here is found wholly through the encounters and
attitudes of his characters - the distrust between Mexicans and
Indians, the intricacies of power and justice, the sere subsistence
level in a country trying to shed the skins of poverty, illiteracy
and a manana resignation. Young Mr. Wilson is a gifted writer able
to project in a clear, almost austere prose, the sense of slow time
in an anonymous village just such as this - lying behind "the
mud-walled stores, the Cabildo, the Church, all bathed in pale
yellow light from the west and crossed with thick shafts of
shadow." With more hope than conviction, one looks to an audience.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Products of the "imagination," such as novels, can be especially
useful tools for understanding how things work in societies far
removed from our own experience. Through the telling of a story, a
sound ethnographic novel conveys more than information. It involves
the reader in the dynamics of life in places where the rules for
action are very different from the rules the reader makes his own
decisions by. Some people believe ethnographic novels are
comparable to fieldnotes- the data themselves in their original,
unanalyzed form. Though I can see the reason for the analogy, the
author still disagree with it. Good fieldnotes record raw
experience. For the time being, the anthropologist squelches his
desire to interpret, and he writes down everything he can see or
remember. Good ethnographic fiction also presents experience raw,
without generalization. But in building the story, in selecting to
tell this because it is important and not to tell that because it
seems trivial, the novelist is analyzing his material. Between the
raw and the cooked, both ethnographies and ethnographic novels
belong in the processed pot. Anthropologists try to make explicit
and public both the method they have used to gather their material
and the means for analyzing it. Ordinarily, a novelist obscures his
analysis-the grounds for the choices he has made-and depends on the
interior logic of the story to make his tale seem "true" or
"believable." But Crazy February works with somewhat different
principles than the author would normally use in writing "fiction."
The book grew directly out of field experience. Wilson felt
strongly that it would stand or fall on its ethnographic
correctness. And so, faced with choices between what the author
would like to see in the story and what he thought would actually
happen to an Indian in the mountains of Chiapas, he consistently
chose "actuality." In a practical, day-to-day writing sense,
reality was the author's rod and my staff. And in the end he was
very happy when anthropologists with greater experience in the
Mayan area found the book essentially exact and, more important,
true to the spirit of the place he had written about.
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