The Red of His Shadow
By Mayra Montero
(Harper Perennial, Paperback, 9780060952914, 176pp.)
Publication Date: August 2002
Categories: General
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It is Holy Week, and the Haitian sugar cane harvesters can temporarily forget their misery and lose themselves in the fervor of Voudon. But amidst the colorful festival, a struggle for power, as well as a devastating passion, develops between Mistress ZulÉ, a Voudon priestess and spiritual leader, and the infamous, bloodthirsty SimilÁ Bolosse, a rival Voudon priest backed by the tontons macoutes.
Based on true events, The Red of His Shadow evokes ferocious love, intense hatred, and the specter of death looming within life. Written in a prose remarkable for its clarity and musicality, the novel manages to be both richly symbolic and intensely physical. Behind a case that Dominican police closed as a simple crime of passion pulses the spell of a war that remains unfinished today.
Mayra Montero was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1952, but has lived in Puerto Rico since the mid 1960s. She studied journalism in Mexico and Puerto Rico and worked for many years as a correspondent in Central America and the Caribbean. She is presently a highly acclaimed journalist in Puerto Rico and writes a weekly column in El Nuevo Dia newspaper. Montero's first book was a collection of short stories, Twenty-Three and a Turtle. Her second book, a novel titled The Braid of the Beautiful Moon, was a finalist for the Herralde awards, one of Europe's most prestigious literary awards. Each of her subsequent books -- The Last Night I Spent With You, The Red of His Shadow, In the Palm of Darkness, and The Messenger -- has been published in the United States in translations by Edith Grossman, as well as in several European countries. Her other nonfiction work appears frequently in scholarly and literary publications throughout the world.
Transfixing ... Montero's unromantic vision and crisp pace strike a harmonious balance with the lushness of the background detail."
-New York Times Book Review
"A major writer of the contemporary, post-Boom generation in Latin America …Startling imagery and hypnotizing storytelling."
-Publishers Weekly
" An astonishing work of the imagination."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A powerful and important book . . . [and] an astonishing work of the immagination."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A work of enormous beauty, violence, and unsentimental grace…Montero writes with fire and acid."
-Boston Globe
"A dazzling, original fugue on love and extinction."
-The New Yorker
"A novel, rich in metaphor and allusion, that will leave most readers breathless at its final curtain drops."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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