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The Jaguar’s Children by John Vaillant: Review

[ http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/bo ... eview.html ]

First fiction effort by award-winning writer offers a devastating portrait of contemporary life in Mexico.

By: Patricia Hluchy Books reviewer, Published on Sat Jan 10 2015

John Vaillant, The Jaguar's Children, Knopf Canada, 280 pages, $29.95

John Vaillant’s The Jaguar’s Children is a devastating portrait of contemporary life in Mexico. There’s the strife-torn southwestern city of Oaxaca, an impoverished nearby Zapotec Indian community where centuries-old traditions are being destroyed, a border town prowled by gang-linked human smugglers. And there is a uniquely Mexican version of hell.

The “inferno” in the novel is, paradoxically, an empty water truck in which a young man named Hector Maria de la Soledad Lazaro Gonzalez, his friend Cesar Ramirez and 13 others hoping for a better life in el norte — the U.S. — are trapped.

Having made their way to the northern Mexican town of Altar, the two friends — like hundreds of thousands before them — paid some “coyotes” to take them to the Promised Land. The metal tank holding the migrants is welded shut so the human cargo can’t be detected by American immigration officials.

But what was supposed to have been an easy, three-hour trip to Arizona has gone horribly wrong. The coyotes have abandoned the broken-down truck, and the occupants, still sealed in, have very little water.

The dank compartment is sweltering by day, freezing at night. In the perpetual darkness the captives argue, despair, drink their urine, cry out.

And, in a series of “soundfiles” that he creates using Cesar’s cellphone, Hector tells the back story of their journey, and of his family and community, to a woman whose name he finds on the device. He hopes that somehow “AnniMac” will send rescuers.

This is the debut novel by Vancouver-based Vaillant, who won the 2005 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction for his first book, The Golden Spruce, and was widely acclaimed for 2010’s The Tiger.

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INTERVIEW: 'The Jaguar's Children' and the Many Gods of Our Moment

[ http://thetyee.ca/Culture/2015/01/17/Ja ... ign=170115 ]

John Vaillant's debut novel tackles 'huge cosmic questions' with emotional urgency. A Tyee interview.

By Sarah Berman, January 17, 2015 TheTyee.ca

''These are the times we live in, where the Spanish god of Jesus and the ancient gods of Mexico and the modern gods of business are harder and harder to tell from one another.'' -- John Vaillant, The Jaguar's Children

EXCERPT:

As a writer who begins and ends his creative process with what keeps him awake at night, Vaillant has no shortage of crises to worry about. Here in Canada, he says, one of the most glaring human dilemmas lies just over the Rocky Mountains.

''The tar sands has been on my mind ever since I learned about it,'' he says. ''I've been fretting about it, lying awake at night thinking about it for 10 years.

''It just seems like the stupidest, most short-sighted thing in the world, to take that stuff out of the ground at this time in history and pump it across this pristine landscape and then ship it across an imperiled ocean,'' he continues. ''I can't imagine something less responsible.''

It's this crisis of conscience that pushed Vaillant to write a rousing call to action against Kinder Morgan in November, when protesters blocked the company's survey work on Burnaby Mountain. He named the Texas oil giant ''the gorilla'' -- observing the havoc its drills wreaked on the mountain. He wrote: ''I am angry at the gorilla but I am angrier at the government that invited it into our home.''

These are the ''huge cosmic questions'' that push Vaillant out of bed at four in the morning. The challenge lies in shaping those gut-feelings into a story. Of Alberta's oil patch, he says, ''I don't quite know where the narrative book is.

''There's a Tar Sands Moby Dick somewhere. And I'd love to write it.''