The Queen of Swords [Hardcover]

In what was at first meant to be a short essay about the influential Mexican writer Elena Garro (1916-1988), Jazmina Barrera’s deep curiosity and exploration give us a singular portrait of a complex life.

Sifting through the writer’s archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research—the correspondence, photos, and books—serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work.Who was Elena Garro, really?

She was a writer, a founder of “magical realism," a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and theI Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination.

The Queen of Swords is a portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable. It transcends mere biography, supplanting something tidy and authoritative for a sprawling experiment in understanding.

US

A LIFE ON THE RUN

The beginning, at least, is clear. In 1916, in the small Asturian town of Cangas de Onís, a Mexican woman named Esperanza Navarro learned that her Spanish husband, José Antonio Garro, was having an affair with her cousin. Esperanza was eight months pregnant and understandably furious. So, she sold her jewels and set out with her two-year-old daughter, Devaki, for the port of Vigo. There, she boarded a ship bound for Veracruz, from where she took a train, with the intention of eventually reaching Mexico City. Losing the race against her biological clock, she went into