Mexican author/publisher Jazmina Barrera and translator Christina MacSweeney reunite for a fourth lauded collaboration, Queen of Swords, winner of the independent bookseller-selected Cercador Prize for translated literature. Barrera originally intended to produce "a modest biographical essay" on Mexican writer, playwright, screenwriter, and poet Elena Garro (1916-1998), but instead "spent two years, six months, and two days" creating this hybrid, genre-defying biography/memoir, as delightful as it is disturbing.
At 26, graduate student Barrera had yet to read Garro. Completing her New York University degree required producing a novel, which had become "a Frankenstein's monster." A teacher suggested Barrera read Garro, particularly because of narrative similarities. Barrera was immediately enthralled. In what she calls "a collection of stories, ideas, facts, and cats," Barrera infectiously unveils her obsession with magical realism originator Garro. In life, her manipulatively abusive husband, Octavio Paz, eclipsed her; Paz's stepfather raped and infected their four-year-old daughter with gonorrhea, yet Paz returned her to live with his parents, where she was raped again. Garro repeatedly considered and attempted suicide; Paz encouraged her. She drew CIA attention for suspected Communist activity and for meeting Lee Harvey Oswald a few months before John F. Kennedy's assassination. Her support of Mexico's pivotal October 2, 1968, student uprising made her a political refugee. She championed women and Indigenous people. She moved (globally) through 86 dwellings--always with a feline menagerie.
Barrera presents the enigmatic Garro in elliptical bursts--meticulously documented with running sidenotes, not footnotes--intertwining her own reactions to engrossing discoveries. That Two Lines Press simultaneously releases Garro's translated story collection The Week of Colors (Barrera's personal favorite) bodes well for inspiring new generations to discover the iconoclast and her writing. --Terry Hong