“We are Green and Trembling”

“We are that which creates life between the rocks and the stars. Star and rock incarnate, we are green and trembling. The world was not made in a single week, beloved aunt, it is made and unmade at every moment.” (We are Green and Trembling, p. 189)

Magical realism again! In We are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara the central character, who narrates the story, is based on a historic figure. He is Antonio de Erauso, an adventurer in colonial South America, who was born Catalina de Erauso, a noblewoman. As a girl, Catalina escaped from a convent and utterly changed her identity to Antonio. The narrative is addressed to Catalina/Antonio’s aunt, who had attempted to force her into convent life. The true story at the heart of the book is already surreal, I think.

Antonio’s narrative alternates between a description of his current situation, isolated and threatened in the jungle with two helpless little children and a narrative of how he got there. (Very surrealistic!) He tries to make the children understand life in general and especially to visualize life in Spain, but they never seem to get it. For example, he tries to explain to the children the idea of oranges… they constantly see new jungle fruits, brought down from the trees by monkeys — but never oranges. For example:

“The monkeys return with fruits that look like artichokes. With a sweet taste somewhere between pineapple and banana. ‘Hey, che, these are your oranges?’ ‘You know they are not.’ ‘And where are your oranges?’  ‘In Spain.’ ‘Chirimoyas, these.’” (p. 36)

Of all the exotic jungle fruit, the chirimoya is the only one I’ve ever seen or tasted, so I noticed this. (Chirimoyas tasted to me like juicy fruit chewing gum.) I did wonder a bit why so many South American novels incorporate magical realism, but I guess I’ll never know. I checked for reviews of the book: there are not many of them.

I did find a summary of the novel by reviewer Brock Kingsley in the Chicago Review of Books:

“As Catalina, Antonio was confined to a convent under the supervision of her aunt, the prioress. The convent soon became a prison, both literally and symbolically. Antonio escapes and begins a process of transformation, drawing on lessons learned in religious life. His journey—from convent escapee to muleteer, cabin boy, soldier, and secretary to a grotesque conquistador—mirrors a continual act of becoming. Antonio’s shape-shifting identity challenges not only the gender norms of the seventeenth century, but also those of our own time. Through his character, the novel interrogates fixed notions of masculinity and the often rigid expectations imposed on trans identities.”

And Laura Pensa in World Literature Today writes:

“Cabezón Cámara combines the most explicit scenes of violence—including a bonfire where people burn alive; the image of a pink, waxy lagoon haunted me that night in a dream—with moments of familiarity and entirely original tenderness. Particularly in Antonio’s relationship with the girls, a bond made of mutual care but also of teasing and abandonment, it becomes clear that, although his attitude and intention might align with those of a white savior, it is the girls who take care of him. They name him, feed him, dress him as a man-bird, walk him into the forest, share with him everything he needs to know to comprehend and accept the course of events. Even his own heroic will (to save the girls from captivity) twists by the force of reality: he is the outsider who needs to be cared for, for which he must first take on the task of caring.”

Well, it was another strange reading choice, and I don’t know how I heard of it.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander. 

Time Flies

Autumn is coming

Time to hide some nuts and berries! (This is Mr.Chips who lives on our porch.)

A few leaves have gone from green to yellow, red, or even white.

Recent Reading

Martin Walker’s latest book about detective Bruno in rural France is a sad shadow of the earlier books in this series. There’s no real plot, no real crime, and no real character development! Bruno does cook a lot — to the point where it feels like one is reading a cookbook, with the detailed descriptions of prep and ingredients for one local dish after another. In earlier books, the cooking was an interesting distraction — here it’s totally over used. Sad to see this travesty on what was once a good detective series.

In Bury Your Past detective Tom Janssen in the English town of Wells-by-the-Sea solves the mystery of a body that has been hidden for six years. The body is uncovered by a violent storm that sets a grim mood for the many revelations that explain this and also other crimes. The detective is relatable, and the plot is well-thought-out. I hope to read more of the books by J.M.Dalgliesh.

Published in 1933, Death on the Oxford Road by E.C.R.Lorac is still a suspenseful and enjoyable read — though the author expresses some outdated attitudes towards people who didn’t fit into village society. A body is found on a little-traveled road, where very few cars pass by. Just this lack of traffic is a notable feature of life 90 years ago: cars were a rarity! Life was different then, but the main conventions of detective fiction were already in place.

 Samantha Schweblin’s short stories, set in argentina, are a little strange. What peculiar characters she depicts!

Good Food

Left: two different ways that we prepared salmon: patties and pan-broiled.
Right: blueberry pancakes and apple-peach cobbler with ice cream.

Classic dinner: lamb chops and corn-on-the-cob with butter.

© 2025 mae sander

Chinese Restaurants Everywhere

 

Chinese restaurants serve more or less adapted meals to people in amazing places throughout the world. In a recently published book titled Have You Eaten Yet? Cheuk Kwan, an author and TV presenter, described quite a few of them. Kwan’s memoir describes his journey to many out-of-the-way places in the course of making a documentary series on Chinese food for Canadian television. I’ve found that the original TV shows are available on Youtube; I will watch some soon, I hope. 

Although the travel and research for the TV series that forms the basis for the book took place 20 years ago, this memoir was written in 2021 and just published in Canada in 2022 and in the US in 2023. I really don’t understand why it took around two decades for the author to write a book based on such old information: it seems to have no recent observations or experiences in it, which makes it a bit disappointing and frustrating to read. So much must have happened since then!

Where are the Chinese Restaurants?

Havana, Cuba; Tamatave, Madagascar; Istanbul, Turkey; Darjeeling, India; São Paulo and Manaus, Brazil, inside the Arctic circle in Tromsø, Norway; Haifa, Israel; and a number of other locations — each place Kwan visited had distinctive Chinese restaurants whose owners shared their fascinating personal and family histories, sometimes for several generations. 

“Have you eaten yet” is the way Chinese people often say “How are you?” — perhaps reflecting a past where food wasn’t abundant, and perhaps just reflecting the shared value of a well-prepared meal. Despite the enormous and varied population of China and the unimaginable extent and long history of the Chinese diaspora, Kwan makes us see how many characteristics remain in common throughout this very large part of the human race. He also makes clear that although his focus is on restaurant people, there are many many other Chinese professionals throughout the world as well.

The book is full of fascinating details about the restaurant owners and workers, and about the many ways they have invented Chinese food to please customers wherever their restaurants may be. While the adaptations are fascinating, I was also interested in the numerous times that the author says the food is fully authentic and equal in quality to that in the most renowned restaurants in Hong Kong. Although the author clearly knows that there are many cuisines practiced by the billion people in China, and many adaptations and inventions of Chinese food in restaurants worldwide, he does a good job of showing its unity in the many restaurants he visited and the many people he interviewed. 

So much to learn! I was fascinated by the many places (on several continents and islands) where Chinese chefs specialized in fish from the local waters, creating traditional Chinese fish dishes with local spices. I had no idea that a Chinese community had lived in Cuba since 1857. I learned that China had a very long cultural influence on the east coast of Africa, with trade routes for Chinese ships established around the first century BCE, and a visit from a fleet in around 1418. I was interested to hear about fusion dishes combining Chinese and Indian food, Chinese and Peruvian food, and a few others. But as I say, I wish there had been some updates for the last 20 years, especially about the major changes that have occurred recently in Hong Kong, the author’s reference city for the best of Chinese cuisine.

And Here at Home —

Of course reading this book made me want Chinese food from our currently-favorite local restaurant, Bao Space, which opened earlier this year. Bao, a type of delicious filled and steamed buns, are the star of their menu. The owners, Jessie Zhu, the main chef, and her husband, Raphael Zhu, came to Ann Arbor from Shanghai. Their roots are in Northern China, where they say bao originally came from. 

I’ve posted about Bao Space a few times, but here’s a bit more…

 This is the Bao Space kitchen, which is visible from the window where orders are placed.

Dough for the bao buns is freshly made with flour, yeast, and milk.

Our order: bao buns, sesame-noodle-cucumber salad, and two cups of lemonade.
The menu is simple: just bao, dumplings, a few soups & noodle bowls, and soft drinks.

One bao filled with pork. Other fillings include chicken, beef, and several vegetarian options.

Review and photos © 2023 mae sander

Shared with The Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

A Ghost Story: Silver Nitrate

Silvia Moreno-Garcia really knows how to write scary stories!
I did a detailed review of her novel Mexican Gothic here.

Lots of good stuff in this ghost-filled tale! Moreno-Garcia knows how to build suspense and horror, and how to embed the scary stuff in everyday concerns. The plot of Silver Nitrate is complicated and wonderfully worked out, involving a number of interesting characters with a variety of occult skills, all set in Mexico City in 1993.

The two main characters in Silver Nitrate -- Tristán and Montserrat -- are slowly swept into a ghost-hunting frenzy, as they try to lift a curse on a lost movie that was being filmed years earlier in a movie studio in Mexico City. The film had used silver nitrate film, an obsolete and dangerous medium. This explosive substance also, they discover, made a perfect vehicle for creating an elaborate portal to the world of evil spirits and occult intentions, as used by an adept and unscrupulous sorcerer and his followers. (But that's enough spoilers!)

Despite the pressures and the dangers Tristán and Montserrat face, they always manage to stop to eat and sleep and regain their strength. These mundane interruptions are very effective at prolonging the suspense that the author is building. For example, just after a grizzly murder, these two are walking along a street:

"The first week of December. It was the season to devour empanadas, eat rosca de reyes, and listen to the fireworks exploding late at night. He was hoping to drink all the way through the posadas—he’d work off the calories in January. It was not the month to be chasing after murderers."  (p. 156).

On a morning after the two of them encounter some very frightening things:

"Tristán plated the eggs. He’d found corn tortillas in the refrigerator, but he clung to his northern customs and preferred flour ones, so he warmed one for Montserrat but none for himself. They took the plates and the glasses filled with orange juice to the table. They ate quietly. The silence strained the ears." (p. 229).  

Or dining at the home of an elderly man who knows how to perform anti-ghost rituals they need to use, and who knows how to stop the attacks of the more and more threatening supernatural creatures in the story:

"The supper consisted of a watery chicken soup that had Tristán yearning for his mother’s lentil soup with chard and the comforts of his apartment." (p. 251).

Also fascinating: Nazi racism and theories of pure blood play a role in the motivation of the sorcerer's creation, and continue to affect the evil ghosts and evil survivors of the curse in Silver Nitrate. In her earlier novel, Mexican Gothic,  Moreno-Garcia similarly created supernatural monsters who looked like white men, and were driven by extreme views on the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of "the other." This is a convention I very much enjoy. As the New York Times reviewer expressed it: "Moreno-Garcia lays bare the compatibility of Nazi ideology with regional ideas of racial supremacy, discrimination against Indigenous groups and desires to mejorar la raza — 'better the race.'”

Note: The ghosts are real! The rivers of blood are real! The temptation to follow a ghost into the night is real! This is a genuine horror novel.

A Parallel Demonstration of Racism in Mexico

A demonstrably fake mummy displayed this week to the Mexican Congress, which is holding hearings 
on extraterrestrial life. DNA shows that this fake is made up of bones from several human and animal remains.

The history of this fake mummy, displayed to the Mexican Congress, is a long one. The participation of a number of fraudsters with faked credentials and lucrative social media campaign to support their "research" is depressingly predictable. In an article in Vox, “The true story of the fake unboxed aliens is wilder than actual aliens: All the greed, fraud, centuries of racism, and deteriorated llama skulls behind Mexico’s unboxed aliens.” author Aja Romano documents the fraud and the role of racism in enabling the fraudsters. I was very interested because it’s the same racist motivation that features in the novel Silver Nitrate.

Romano writes: “even beyond the travesty that is disturbing individual disinterred remains lie the centuries of societal attempts to diminish the glory of pre-Columbian artists and architects and turn their works into inconceivable ancient alien wonders.”

Interesting parallels thus seem to exixt between these various examples of sheer racism in South America and Mexico.

Review © 2023 mae sander.

Fernando Botero (1932-2023)

View of Plaza Botero from the Metro Station in Medellin, Colombia in Smithsonian Magazine

Fernando Botero, who died earlier this week, was a very popular artist, whose paintings and sculpture were adored by many people — with the possible exception of art critics. His highly recognizable style involved depicting human and animal figures expanded beyond any naturalistic representation, but with an intriguing insight gained by making them large. After mentioning him yesterday, I wanted to see more images of his work, so I'm sharing them here.
 

Plaza Botgero in Medellin, Columbia. (Wikipedia)

Botero Sculpture (Source)

A story of a Botero sculpture in Medellin: 

“There is an eerie sculpture of Botero in the Parque San Antonio. It is his well-known bird sculpture in bronze, but there is massive damage to it. Vandalism, you think. But on June 10, 1995 a bomb was placed in or under the sculpture and exploded in the evening during a concert.  

 

“Around 23 people died, and a link was suspected to an arrest a day earlier of a leader of the Cali drug cartel. It was one of the many acts of violence in a city that had gotten used to it. Botero decided to leave the damaged sculpture in place, as an hommage to the deceased and a permanent place of remembrance. And he donated a new one, placed twenty metres apart, to illustrate the meaningless of violence.” (Source)

 

The damaged bird sculpture.

In contrast to the popularity of Botero’s seemingly cartoonish paintings, he was also a highly political and committed artist. Influenced by the muralists such as Diego Rivera, he often depicted the ordinary people of his native Columbia. His activism is reflected in several projects:

“In the 60s and 70s he produced a series of portraits of Latin American dictators in which the puffed-up size of the figures was a satirical reflection on their self-importance. Nor could he remain indifferent to the drug violence that made his home city at one time named the most dangerous in the world, especially when the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar dominated the trade. In 2004 Botero produced a series of paintings of him being hunted down and killed in 1993, as well as other scenes from the violence that gripped Colombia in the 90s. The most controversial of his more political works was the series he produced in 2004-05 of around 80 paintings and 100 drawings depicting the torture by US forces of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.” (source)

“Official Portrait of the Military Junta,” 1971.

Botero and his Work

From Botero obituary in the Guardian.

From Botero Obituary in the Washington Post.

 

From Botero Obituary on NPR

 

From Botero Obituary in the New York Times.

Blog post by mae sander.

Images as credited.

Shared with Sami’s Monday Murals.

"Green Mansions" by W. H. Hudson

 

Henri Rousseau, The Snake Charmer (1907)

W.H. Hudson (1841-1922) and Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) are linked in my mind. 

Rousseau is well-known as a painter of imaginary scenes of life in jungles far from his home in Paris. His vision of the tropics is based more on the dioramas of the Paris Natural History museum and maybe the zoo than on any actual observation, as he never traveled, only imagined the places that he painted. 

Hudson was a naturalist who wrote many works about the natural history of South America, especially his native Argentina. I recently read quite a lot about Hudson in Jonathan Meiburg's A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey. Hudson is an interesting character, though Meiburg actually told me more than I wanted to know about him. But I got intrigued, and read Hudson's best-known work, the novel, Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904).

As I read, I thought about Rousseau's paintings, which date from the same time and maybe the same spirit of romantic longing for some imaginary primeval jungle environment far from the city. Hudson lived in London for much of his later life, and he only saw the open pampas of Argentina where he was born (to English-speaking parents), not the lush forests of the Amazon and the Orinoco Rivers in the north of the continent. So Green Mansions, like The Snake Charmer, is based on imagination more than on observation. 

Green Mansions is a dramatic and tragic tale of a white man named Abel who is living in a remote tropical village with a small number of native inhabitants for whom he has little respect. He defies their instructions to stay away from a part of their territory that's inhabited by evil and little-understood spirits. In this forbidden forest Abel finds a beautiful woman -- maybe a she's creature that's not quite human and only seems like a small woman. 

Rima, the forest woman, speaks a language that sounds like whistling bird song, but she also knows Spanish, which Abel speaks as well as English. She has an uncanny ability to appear for a moment, and then to disappear into the forest, and Abel becomes obsessed with her, and then goes with her on a long and futile search for her place of origin. Their story is sad and very romantic, as he convinces her to love him in a repressed Victorian kind of way. If you want a plot summary, there are many available. 

In all of the novel's attitudes, including a pretty bad contempt for the natives and their culture, Hudson's work is very much a product of its time. I read it when I was in high school, and couldn't make sense of it. Now that I can make sense of it, I'm not crazy about its overblown emotionality. I have reservations about the described bravery of a white man (self-identified as a white man over and over) who walks through the jungle alone, eating bird's eggs and snakes and odd vegetation. The gushing descriptions of Abel's love for Rima, a slightly supernatural creature, don't appeal to my literary tastes. Very dated, I'd say.

In contrast, Rousseau's paintings have always fascinated me, and I love to look at them. Rousseau's vision of the mysterious jungle is not accompanied by a romantic and emotional sensibility. but by some sort of fascination with the idea of jungles and snakes and wild animals. His primitive style is famous and much discussed in the context of modernism in art: he seems to look forward to the twentieth century not backward to the past.

Note that I have no reason to think there is actually a connection between painter Henri Rousseau and author W.H. Hudson, it just occurred to me while I was reading. I tried briefly to find a previously identified connection, but did not discover any. I did locate a book called "Rousseau and Naturalism in Life and Thought" by an author named William Henry Hudson. However, it's by ANOTHER man named William Henry Hudson, an obscure American professor who lived at about the same time! And it's about the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, not the painter Henri Rousseau. Go figure.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.