the stillness of love and exile
THE STILLNESS OF LOVE AND EXILE, a novel by the talented writer Rosa Martha Villarreal, is a tale of romance with visionary and philosophical undertones. Lilia, a beautiful young Mexican girl, is raped by a drug lord. Unable to face her family afterwards, she flees with him. Eventually she escapes her tormenter and moves to a small town in northern Mexico which is steeped in its Spanish past. She falls in love with three different men. The first, San Andres Gabriel,”believed himself to be a traveling composer of boleros from Seville.” The second, Miguel, a Californian, has come to the town seeking knowledge of his Jewish roots. The third, Agustin San Andres, is a guitar maker. Yet all three men appear to be manifestations of one being. The search for identity is a leitmotif that runs throughout. Characters seek wholeness through connection with the past, both on an individual and collective level. The guitarist seeks to find himself through Lilia. Miguel seeks himself through his ancestral roots, long concealed. “Are we dreams inhabiting a body?…There are more invisible than visible natures in the universe.” Miguel dreams “of an Arabian seaport with…busy market-places and synagogues and minarets. Did these images arise from his own genealogical rivers? Or were they those of his wife?” Through the medium of the novel, Villarreal questions the nature of reality. Can a person inhabit more than one time and place? Are there multiple universes, as Kabbalists believe? Time and space are dealt with as fluid, leaving the reader with intriguing material for thought.
