I’ve got issues. No breaking news there. I’m scattered all over the map. Focus has left the building. I’m juggling one too many eggs. There are just too many irons in the fire.
In the sense that, at any one time, you can usually find probably a dozen books, magazines, and newspapers flipped open in random fashion in various rooms of my current asylum over here in the Heber foothills, it wouldn’t be a stab in the dark to assume that some form of attention deficit disorder has taken up residency.
The mags and rags, of course, recycle much quicker than the hard covers. That’s a given. The symptoms basically are manifested in books, of which there is usually at least a quartet in competition for my favors. Until recently, that is. For the past few weeks, I’ve been undergoing a “healing” of sorts in this area.
Allow me to set the stage. For reasons that become less clear each succeeding day, a little over a month ago, while still working through B. Traven’s “The Rebellion of the Hanged” and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” I began both “The Iliad of Homer” and Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of King Lear” on the same day. Go figure.
Actually, you don’t need to. Here’s the step-by-step thought evolution that led to such behavioral weirdness. On a Book TV panel discussion on the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Catch-22,” more than one of the participants mentioned that author Joseph Heller’s favorite book was “The Iliad.” And, if that wasn’t enough, in summation, panel member Robert Gottlieb, editor of “Catch-22,” stated with emphasis that as far as he was concerned the only books any of us needed to read were “The Iliad” and King Lear.”
Being in possession of both, I immediately plucked them off their respective shelves and, not unlike top-40 records, put them into a “heavy rotation” with Traven and Nabokov.
Then came word that Luis Alberto Urrea’s “Queen of America” was due to come out of the chute and it wasn’t long before I held a copy in my grimy little hands. Deeming five books to be too unwieldy, even for me, I put away the Nabokov, finished the Traven, and hungrily began feasting on the Queen.
But, try as I might, I couldn’t go cold turkey! As alluring as Urrea’s sequel to “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” resonated within my psyche’s lust centers, I still couldn’t remain faithful. From the moment Achilles turns his back on Agamemnon in a dispute over the lovely Briseis in the Iliad, I lost all sense of loyalty. And it was the same when King Lear banished his equally quite lovely youngest daughter Cordelia from inheriting his crown.
Whereas both Briseis and Cordelia needed me to watch out for them in their respective sagas and tragedies, I was the one in need when it came to Teresita, the “hummingbird’s daughter” and now “Queen of America.” So when literary push came to shove, it was Urrea standing triumphant over both Homer and Shakespeare.
And that’s where the healing came in through Urrea’s great aunt Teresita, the saintly Yaqui-mestizo with a touch like warm honey that melts pain and suffering. With her help, I was able to set aside both Briseis and Cordelia for the time being and keep the faith with the saint of Cabora, Sinaloa, Mexico, a landscape quite familiar to my ’60s California tribe.
Although the pull of the sequel is somewhat less than the original, due, in the main, to a change of venue from Mexico to the U.S., it is the internal landscape of Teresita that is most honored by Urrea’s fans. One of the most transcendental and unassuming of any protagonist to come down the historical-fiction road in many a year, this queen has little use for crowns.
She is a human, however, with all the frailties of her species raising their heads without warning in this new work as she attempts to negotiate the culture of early-20th century America both in the wild-and-wooly West and with the straw-hat bowler set of New York City.
Luis Alberto Urrea, of course, is also the author of “The Devil’s Highway,” another great work of the U.S. and Mexico borderland, and, it should be noted, is one of the coolest cats currently plying the literary trade both here and abroad. Most of all, as a sinner without focus, I thank him for the healing touch of Teresita Urrea, the saint of Caborra. But, as they say in the song, “Luis Luis ohhh no me gotta go now.”
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.