From Publishers Weekly
A nearly 1,500-page novel that was 12 years in the making deserves consideration, even though in this instance, its complex central story could have been told in 500 pages. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz died of the plague in Mexico in 1695, and for the next two centuries her work was rarely referenced or read. Her poems, confessions and life story were rediscovered in the 20th century, most notably by Mexican poet Octavio Paz. In Anderson's elephantine debut novel, Sor Juana's story is told through the testimony of her "secretary," Antonia Mora (her intellectual equal), Carlos Sigüenza y Gongora (a rival and a suitor), her confessor, Father Núñez (an enemy), and Sor Juana herself. We follow her fortunes from her illegitimate birth, through her inability to find success as a poet and scholar (due both to her gender and the authoritarian nature of colonial Mexican society), her taking of the veil and-finally-her downfall. As if distrusting his material, however, Anderson encloses Sor Juana's story within a contemporary tale focused on Beulah Limosneros, a brilliant but unstable student of Sor Juana's writing who begins an affair with Donald Gregory, her married English professor. With Gregory, Beulah re-enacts the scorned woman role à la Fatal Attraction with a passive-aggressive twist. Beulah keeps a journal that is a mixture of sophomoric beat poetry and mystical descriptions of sex. She is the embodiment of present day angst: there are food issues, childhood abuse, low self-esteem. There are hundreds too many pages of her interior life. The conjunction of Limosneros's story and Sor Juana's is mutually weakening. Still, the central narration is definitely worth following, particularly for its version of the inevitable conflict between beauty, intellect and government power. Unfortunately, the framing story is ludicrous; this is no Pale Fire. Sor Juana's translated verse doesn't jump out (despite some translations by Paz), but her confession does, as does the way Anderson conveys the gradual closing in of forces beyond her control, reminiscent of Akhmatova's confrontations with Stalin.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Talk about irony: a sojourn in Mexico writing short stories prompted Canadian writer Anderson to render one of the longest books in recent memory. Twelve years in the making, this dizzying debut is more than a magnum opus; it's a mega-magnum opus. Lyrical, provocative, and painstakingly detailed, the novel follows the lives of two child prodigies separated by three centuries: real-life seventeenth-century poet Juana Ines de la Cruz, who entered a convent at age 19 and later took a vow of silence, and fictional Canadian Beulah Limosneros, a moody, modern-day scholar singularly obsessed with the nun's tragic life. Ranging from excerpts from Sor Juana's luminous verse to Beulah's complex relationship with her shadowy, seductive professor, Anderson's narrative revolves around the question, "Why would a genius withdraw from the world?" Blending history, mystery, and theology, Anderson simultaneously ponders and honors the life of a little-known poet who inspired the likes of Robert Graves, Diane Ackerman, and Octavio Paz. It takes a special breed of reader to brave this book: one with steely determination and strong arms, too (Anderson's Canadian publisher joked about selling a lectern or reading table along with the tome). Alas, even the most devoted bibliophiles will wonder if the subject matter of this never-ending story warrants its mind-numbing length. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Review
“Anderson writes as the best painters paint — with clarity, finesse and infinite suggestion. Yes, to answer your question at long last, all this beauty is worth the trip. The many trips.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“…Hunger’s Brides is an instant collector’s item…”
—Toronto Star
“Not unlike Sor Juana herself, Hunger’s Brides is a beautiful monster that resists, often with brilliance, the unforgiving logics of myopic inquisition.”
—Calgary Herald
“Hunger’s Brides, one of the biggest gambles in recent Canadian publishing, is one of the most remarkable books in recent memory…. Impressive… Anderson’s debut stands proudly alongside such works as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy.”
—Robert J. Wiersma, Quill & Quire, starred review
“Already causing a stir in literary circles, the Calgary writer’s epic story that’s part historical novel, part modern murder mystery, is highly anticipated and poised to become one of the country’s biggest books of the season — literally.”
—Calgary Herald
“At 1,358 pages, Paul Anderson’s debut novel is almost a library in miniature, and the story of its creation itself an epic…. No other Canadian book has generated such pre-publication talk in 2004. Hunger’s Brides could turn out to be the book of the year, and those 5,000 hardcovers collector’s items.”
—Maclean’s
—The Vancouver Sun
“…Hunger’s Brides is an instant collector’s item…”
—Toronto Star
“Not unlike Sor Juana herself, Hunger’s Brides is a beautiful monster that resists, often with brilliance, the unforgiving logics of myopic inquisition.”
—Calgary Herald
“Hunger’s Brides, one of the biggest gambles in recent Canadian publishing, is one of the most remarkable books in recent memory…. Impressive… Anderson’s debut stands proudly alongside such works as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy.”
—Robert J. Wiersma, Quill & Quire, starred review
“Already causing a stir in literary circles, the Calgary writer’s epic story that’s part historical novel, part modern murder mystery, is highly anticipated and poised to become one of the country’s biggest books of the season — literally.”
—Calgary Herald
“At 1,358 pages, Paul Anderson’s debut novel is almost a library in miniature, and the story of its creation itself an epic…. No other Canadian book has generated such pre-publication talk in 2004. Hunger’s Brides could turn out to be the book of the year, and those 5,000 hardcovers collector’s items.”
—Maclean’s
Book Description
An epic novel of genius and obsession — apocalyptic, lyrical and erotically charged. Spanning three centuries and two cultures, Hunger’s Brides brings to vivid life the greatest Spanish poet of her time, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and plumbs a mystery that has intrigued writers as diverse as Robert Graves, Diane Ackerman, Eduardo Galeano and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. Why did a writer of such gifts silence herself?
At the time of her death in 1695, Juana Inés de la Cruz was arguably the greatest writer working in any European tongue, yet she had never set foot in Europe. Instead she was born among the descendants of the Aztec empire, in the shadow of the mountain pass Cortés and his troops descended on their advance to Montezuma’s capital. A child prodigy from a barbarous wilderness, her beauty and wit provoked a sensation at the viceregal court in Mexico City. But at the age of nineteen, still a favourite of the court, Juana entered a convent, and from that point her life unfolded between the mystery of her sudden flight from palace to cloister, and the enigma of her final vow of silence, signed in blood. After a quarter-century of graceful, often sensuous poetry, plays and theological argument, Sor Juana chose silence, which she maintained until she died of plague at the age of forty-five.
Drawing on chronicles of the conquest and histories of the Inquisition, myth cycles and archeological studies, ancient poetry and early Spanish accounts of blood sacrifice, Hunger’s Brides is a mammoth work of inspired historical fiction framed in a contemporary mystery. In the dead of a Calgary winter night, a man escapes from an apartment in which a young woman lies bleeding — in his arms he clutches a box he has found on her table addressed to him. He is Donald Gregory, a once-respected, now-disgraced, academic. She is Beulah Limosneros, one of his students, and for a brief time his lover. Brilliant, erratic, voracious, she had disappeared two years earlier in Mexico, following the thread of her growing obsession with Sor Juana. Over the ensuing days and weeks, as a police investigation closes in around him, Gregory pieces together the contents of the box she has left him: a poetic journal of her travel in Mexico, diaries, research notes, unposted letters, and a strange manuscript — part biography, part novel — on Sor Juana.
Hunger’s Brides is a dramatic unveiling of three intimate journeys: a man’s forced march to self-knowledge, a great poet’s withdrawal from the world, and a profane mystic’s pilgrimage into modern Mexico, in which the bones of the past constantly poke through a present built on the ruins of the vanquished.
Excerpt from Hunger’s Brides
“From the moment I was first illuminated by the light of reason, my inclination toward letters has been so vehement that not even the admonitions of others . . . nor my own meditations have been sufficient to cause me to forswear this natural impulse that God placed in me . . . that inclination exploded in me like gunpowder. . . .”
—Sor Juana, in a letter of self-defence written to a bishop in 1691, just before she took a vow of silence
At the time of her death in 1695, Juana Inés de la Cruz was arguably the greatest writer working in any European tongue, yet she had never set foot in Europe. Instead she was born among the descendants of the Aztec empire, in the shadow of the mountain pass Cortés and his troops descended on their advance to Montezuma’s capital. A child prodigy from a barbarous wilderness, her beauty and wit provoked a sensation at the viceregal court in Mexico City. But at the age of nineteen, still a favourite of the court, Juana entered a convent, and from that point her life unfolded between the mystery of her sudden flight from palace to cloister, and the enigma of her final vow of silence, signed in blood. After a quarter-century of graceful, often sensuous poetry, plays and theological argument, Sor Juana chose silence, which she maintained until she died of plague at the age of forty-five.
Drawing on chronicles of the conquest and histories of the Inquisition, myth cycles and archeological studies, ancient poetry and early Spanish accounts of blood sacrifice, Hunger’s Brides is a mammoth work of inspired historical fiction framed in a contemporary mystery. In the dead of a Calgary winter night, a man escapes from an apartment in which a young woman lies bleeding — in his arms he clutches a box he has found on her table addressed to him. He is Donald Gregory, a once-respected, now-disgraced, academic. She is Beulah Limosneros, one of his students, and for a brief time his lover. Brilliant, erratic, voracious, she had disappeared two years earlier in Mexico, following the thread of her growing obsession with Sor Juana. Over the ensuing days and weeks, as a police investigation closes in around him, Gregory pieces together the contents of the box she has left him: a poetic journal of her travel in Mexico, diaries, research notes, unposted letters, and a strange manuscript — part biography, part novel — on Sor Juana.
Hunger’s Brides is a dramatic unveiling of three intimate journeys: a man’s forced march to self-knowledge, a great poet’s withdrawal from the world, and a profane mystic’s pilgrimage into modern Mexico, in which the bones of the past constantly poke through a present built on the ruins of the vanquished.
Excerpt from Hunger’s Brides
“From the moment I was first illuminated by the light of reason, my inclination toward letters has been so vehement that not even the admonitions of others . . . nor my own meditations have been sufficient to cause me to forswear this natural impulse that God placed in me . . . that inclination exploded in me like gunpowder. . . .”
—Sor Juana, in a letter of self-defence written to a bishop in 1691, just before she took a vow of silence
From the Back Cover
“Anderson writes as the best painters paint — with clarity, finesse and infinite suggestion. Yes, to answer your question at long last, all this beauty is worth the trip. The many trips.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“…Hunger’s Brides is an instant collector’s item…”
—Toronto Star
“Not unlike Sor Juana herself, Hunger’s Brides is a beautiful monster that resists, often with brilliance, the unforgiving logics of myopic inquisition.”
—Calgary Herald
“Hunger’s Brides, one of the biggest gambles in recent Canadian publishing, is one of the most remarkable books in recent memory…. Impressive… Anderson’s debut stands proudly alongside such works as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy.”
—Robert J. Wiersma, Quill & Quire, starred review
“Already causing a stir in literary circles, the Calgary writer’s epic story that’s part historical novel, part modern murder mystery, is highly anticipated and poised to become one of the country’s biggest books of the season — literally.”
—Calgary Herald
“At 1,358 pages, Paul Anderson’s debut novel is almost a library in miniature, and the story of its creation itself an epic…. No other Canadian book has generated such pre-publication talk in 2004. Hunger’s Brides could turn out to be the book of the year, and those 5,000 hardcovers collector’s items.”
—Maclean’s
—The Vancouver Sun
“…Hunger’s Brides is an instant collector’s item…”
—Toronto Star
“Not unlike Sor Juana herself, Hunger’s Brides is a beautiful monster that resists, often with brilliance, the unforgiving logics of myopic inquisition.”
—Calgary Herald
“Hunger’s Brides, one of the biggest gambles in recent Canadian publishing, is one of the most remarkable books in recent memory…. Impressive… Anderson’s debut stands proudly alongside such works as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy.”
—Robert J. Wiersma, Quill & Quire, starred review
“Already causing a stir in literary circles, the Calgary writer’s epic story that’s part historical novel, part modern murder mystery, is highly anticipated and poised to become one of the country’s biggest books of the season — literally.”
—Calgary Herald
“At 1,358 pages, Paul Anderson’s debut novel is almost a library in miniature, and the story of its creation itself an epic…. No other Canadian book has generated such pre-publication talk in 2004. Hunger’s Brides could turn out to be the book of the year, and those 5,000 hardcovers collector’s items.”
—Maclean’s
About the Author
Paul Anderson left Canada in his early twenties and spent fifteen years travelling in Asia, studying in Europe, teaching in Latin America, and logging 25,000 miles of coastal and ocean sailing. Hunger’s Brides, his first novel, has been a labour of twelve years. In 1996, Alberta’s One Yellow Rabbit company toured a dramatic reading adapted from the manuscript by the author, and performed in the convent where Sor Juana died. Anderson lives in Calgary.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
When the documents that have become this book came into my hands, my first thought was not of evening the score. I felt panic — and removed a manuscript about to implicate me in the carnage in that room. But as I began to see what a very small part I played in her story, dread and agitation gave way to relief. Then, to a certain indignation.
Beulah Limosneros had been a brilliantly accomplished protégée of mine, even as she spent her every spare moment researching the great seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695). That Beulah became obsessed with Sor Juana is understandable. Of all the giants of world literature, her story is among the most captivating. A child prodigy who taught herself to read at three, she went from a farm in the wilds of Old Mexico to the very pinnacle of Spanish literature, emerging as the last great poet of its golden age. As a teenager she dazzled the New World’s most sumptuous court and lived as an intimate of its vice-queen. Proto-feminist and slave owner, theologian and musical theorist, fabled beauty and nun — for twenty-five years she championed, against the unrelenting attacks of Church patriarchs, a woman’s right to a life of the mind. Sor Juana defended also a nun’s right to compose exquisitely sensuous and lucid poetry. And in doing so herself, she repeatedly defied her confessor, the Chief Censor for the Holy Inquisition. Her writing career unfolds between the mystery of a sudden flight from palace to cloister and the enigma of a final spiritual testament signed in blood.
A worthy research subject. But during Beulah’s time with me, her notes, historical oddments and lyrical fabrications concerning Sor Juana came to look less and less like scholarship until, at the end, the work was more like a lurid cross between novel of ideas and tell-all biography. In this, my part was not so small. Now, with nothing but time on my hands, I’ve decided to edit and emend her unfinished manuscript. I’ve done it to set the record straight, perhaps to right a few wrongs.
At the outset, though, my intent had been to set her little pearl in such a way as to reveal all its eccentricities. Even she thought of it as baroque. Taking my cue from Beulah’s own early work, I settled on the format of literary biography, finding this suited to my own, more modest, talents. I’ve extended the story’s reach, however, to embrace not just Sor Juana but Beulah too. I have used every resource at my disposal and many that should not have been: Beulah’s diary, her dream record, her diet journals.
And of course there was the manuscript itself: a mangy stack of papers of assorted sizes and colours, dog-eared, stained and spattered. Scripts ranging from scrawl to type to childlike printing that ignored the lines. Napkins, gas bills and manila envelopes. Clean white sheets started fresh in a full and fluid hand become by page’s end a pinched and graphic twitching from which I could decipher only the occasional letter. The typed pages, a total of 457, were not necessarily the easiest: Beulah’s hand would sometimes slip from ASDF to SDFG or even from JKL; to YUIO. I could read certain passages only by decoding painstakingly, letter by letter.
Overall, I’ve felt compelled to temper the wildness of her tone and the extremism of her conclusions, to bridge the gaps in her research and to abridge her lyrical flights. To draw just the occasional line between truth and fantasy. And then, to find an ending. The task has not been without its challenges, and not without its diversions. Yet my attempts to recreate myself with these materials would never have seen the light of day were it not for what I have found here. It is a sort of true-crime story, a document for an insatiable time.
But now I wonder if all this feels too impersonal. Perhaps knowing where it ends, with Beulah on her way to a sanatorium. Yes, a more intimate start.
Here, meanwhile, my own drama begins, with me making sense of retirement at forty-two. I’m sure I feel as many retirees do. We are like poets in exile on unfashionable islands. We are the tiny emperor appealing to history. We are the last living alchemist.
Getting up from the desk, I raise the blinds and stand a moment staring into the west. A sea of stone heaves up before these windows, a slab of Cambrian time. From the pilings beneath my feet, a wide trough slopes away deep and slow, then out to the Rockies’ massive cresting. Most days I see a rib cage there, upthrust, transected by a glacial blade. It carves clean to the bone, laying bare a jagged spine of peaks that arches south along the broken curvature of the earth. This, it seems, is to be my consolation: to rediscover a landscape once lost to me. Days I spend walking the foothills above Cochrane, twenty-six miles from Calgary. My nights I spend quietly, in a vast, vaulted affair of varnished logs and endless windows euphemistically called a cabin by the former colleague who has lent it to me. My retreat stands like a cathedral on the last high tableland before the foothills. Below, a patchwork of leafless poplar, and thick spruce spilling in soft folds to the valley floor. The Bow snakes flat and white among the bluffs. Beneath the thinning ice the river quickens. The end of winter comes late up here.
I look out the north window at a pumpjack nodding away like a relentless rocking horse, while in the distance the wheels of justice grind slow and inhumanly fine. From where I now stand I see them — yoked, as Sor Juana might say, to the blind circlings of an ass.
So. A beginning.
Donald J. Gregory, Ph.D.
Cochrane, Alberta
May 9, 1995
When the documents that have become this book came into my hands, my first thought was not of evening the score. I felt panic — and removed a manuscript about to implicate me in the carnage in that room. But as I began to see what a very small part I played in her story, dread and agitation gave way to relief. Then, to a certain indignation.
Beulah Limosneros had been a brilliantly accomplished protégée of mine, even as she spent her every spare moment researching the great seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695). That Beulah became obsessed with Sor Juana is understandable. Of all the giants of world literature, her story is among the most captivating. A child prodigy who taught herself to read at three, she went from a farm in the wilds of Old Mexico to the very pinnacle of Spanish literature, emerging as the last great poet of its golden age. As a teenager she dazzled the New World’s most sumptuous court and lived as an intimate of its vice-queen. Proto-feminist and slave owner, theologian and musical theorist, fabled beauty and nun — for twenty-five years she championed, against the unrelenting attacks of Church patriarchs, a woman’s right to a life of the mind. Sor Juana defended also a nun’s right to compose exquisitely sensuous and lucid poetry. And in doing so herself, she repeatedly defied her confessor, the Chief Censor for the Holy Inquisition. Her writing career unfolds between the mystery of a sudden flight from palace to cloister and the enigma of a final spiritual testament signed in blood.
A worthy research subject. But during Beulah’s time with me, her notes, historical oddments and lyrical fabrications concerning Sor Juana came to look less and less like scholarship until, at the end, the work was more like a lurid cross between novel of ideas and tell-all biography. In this, my part was not so small. Now, with nothing but time on my hands, I’ve decided to edit and emend her unfinished manuscript. I’ve done it to set the record straight, perhaps to right a few wrongs.
At the outset, though, my intent had been to set her little pearl in such a way as to reveal all its eccentricities. Even she thought of it as baroque. Taking my cue from Beulah’s own early work, I settled on the format of literary biography, finding this suited to my own, more modest, talents. I’ve extended the story’s reach, however, to embrace not just Sor Juana but Beulah too. I have used every resource at my disposal and many that should not have been: Beulah’s diary, her dream record, her diet journals.
And of course there was the manuscript itself: a mangy stack of papers of assorted sizes and colours, dog-eared, stained and spattered. Scripts ranging from scrawl to type to childlike printing that ignored the lines. Napkins, gas bills and manila envelopes. Clean white sheets started fresh in a full and fluid hand become by page’s end a pinched and graphic twitching from which I could decipher only the occasional letter. The typed pages, a total of 457, were not necessarily the easiest: Beulah’s hand would sometimes slip from ASDF to SDFG or even from JKL; to YUIO. I could read certain passages only by decoding painstakingly, letter by letter.
Overall, I’ve felt compelled to temper the wildness of her tone and the extremism of her conclusions, to bridge the gaps in her research and to abridge her lyrical flights. To draw just the occasional line between truth and fantasy. And then, to find an ending. The task has not been without its challenges, and not without its diversions. Yet my attempts to recreate myself with these materials would never have seen the light of day were it not for what I have found here. It is a sort of true-crime story, a document for an insatiable time.
But now I wonder if all this feels too impersonal. Perhaps knowing where it ends, with Beulah on her way to a sanatorium. Yes, a more intimate start.
Here, meanwhile, my own drama begins, with me making sense of retirement at forty-two. I’m sure I feel as many retirees do. We are like poets in exile on unfashionable islands. We are the tiny emperor appealing to history. We are the last living alchemist.
Getting up from the desk, I raise the blinds and stand a moment staring into the west. A sea of stone heaves up before these windows, a slab of Cambrian time. From the pilings beneath my feet, a wide trough slopes away deep and slow, then out to the Rockies’ massive cresting. Most days I see a rib cage there, upthrust, transected by a glacial blade. It carves clean to the bone, laying bare a jagged spine of peaks that arches south along the broken curvature of the earth. This, it seems, is to be my consolation: to rediscover a landscape once lost to me. Days I spend walking the foothills above Cochrane, twenty-six miles from Calgary. My nights I spend quietly, in a vast, vaulted affair of varnished logs and endless windows euphemistically called a cabin by the former colleague who has lent it to me. My retreat stands like a cathedral on the last high tableland before the foothills. Below, a patchwork of leafless poplar, and thick spruce spilling in soft folds to the valley floor. The Bow snakes flat and white among the bluffs. Beneath the thinning ice the river quickens. The end of winter comes late up here.
I look out the north window at a pumpjack nodding away like a relentless rocking horse, while in the distance the wheels of justice grind slow and inhumanly fine. From where I now stand I see them — yoked, as Sor Juana might say, to the blind circlings of an ass.
So. A beginning.
Donald J. Gregory, Ph.D.
Cochrane, Alberta
May 9, 1995
