La Gran Gira Mundial de Lectura / Méjico.
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Today we jump the puddle and finally land on ‘the continent’. First stop, Méjico lindo and our monumental Carlos Fuentes.
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5. *El Naranjo* (Alfaguara, 1993, 260 pp.) — Carlos Fuentes. This beautiful book is a collection of five stories that explore the painful process whereby two cultures violently come in contact through military conquest, unleashing developments that ultimately will lead to cultural syncretism and an unpredictable new era. The stories, fictionalized accounts of historical facts, can be read and considered by themselves but contain elements that tie them together, sometimes seemingly in anachronical directions. But one common element to all of them is the orange tree (el Naranjo). It travels with the conqueror and adapts to integrate itself into many diverse environments and cultures. It stands as the elements of a transplanted culture that by adapting to the new terrain will bear the fruit of a new era.
Carlos Fuentes masterfully conveys the dehumanizing (although very ‘human’) spiritual violence the conqueror must impart upon himself and among themselves as part of the conquering endeavor and how the conqueror is in many cases and in different degrees spiritually and culturally conquered by the newfound culture.