Novel opens magical window on love
By Paul Haist
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Portland writer Jan Baross' first novel, "Jose Builds a Woman," which was announced here at the time of its initial release earlier this year, is a timeless, lusty paean to love in many forms and an uncommonly satisfying tale.
Working in the genre of magical realism, Baross tells the story of Tortugina, a young Mexican peasant, from the time of her adolescence to the somewhat premature end of her life on earth as the mother of Jose whose childhood and young adulthood has been plagued by Tortugina's shortcomings, failures and misfortune.
Such a synopsis hardly does justice to this wild, funny, wonderful and sometimes Felliniesque tale of love—a parent's love, children's love and the eternal love that unites lovers everywhere.
Each page is alive with compelling imagery that verges on the poetic, at once as rich and uncomplicated as a simple tapioca pudding, never contrived and always surprising, often even astonishing.
Baross' tightly structured plot moves rapidly and, like a well-crafted screenplay, turns on credible and genuinely surprising reversals at just the right moment each time.
The story begins and ends in a tiny fishing village where the only creatures that are harvested from the sea are the octopus that thrive there.
The girl Torgtugina is in love with Gabito, a handsome young octopus diver. The love is mutual, but tragically fated—a love that never will be consummated in this world, or not entirely in this world.
Through the liberties afforded by magical realism, Tortugina becomes the wife of two men, one living, one a ghost. One husband evolves as a nemesis to Tortugina, but not an evil man, more the victim of a curse whose occasionally aberrant cruelty derives from circumstances not entirely in his control. The other husband hovers over Tortugina as a guardian angel of sorts, but with shortcomings of his own—occasional clumsiness, ineptness or want of courage.
All the trials and the tender disappointments and postponed fulfillment that unfold for Tortugina up to and including the story's heart-wrenching and sob-inducing conclusion can be viewed as an allegory about the fullness and universality of love.
Magical realist stories frequently paint with broad brushes in the same way that opera does. But the seeming simplicity implicit in the technique notwithstanding, we still weep for Madama Butterfly and Senora Tortugina—or what they stand for—because those bold strokes of story?telling go directly to our heart and address the central issues of the life of each of us.
Baross has crafted a story that synthesizes the different types of love we know, a parent for a child, a child for a parent, and that which unites lovers. She even acknowledges the love we have for our neighbors.
It is no stretch to find in Baross' novel the idea that the love that connects one man and one woman is shared in equal measure among all the fruit of that union, down through all time and across all generations.
One eternal love affair engenders circles of love, each of which engenders new eternal love affairs encompassing the man and the woman, the children, the grandparents into antiquity and all who are yet to come—countless intersecting circles of love.
The topic of Barros' novel is the immutable centrality of human love from our very beginning.
A sub-topic, which the author seems to relish in print, is the carnal-spiritual connection—what the metaphysicist John Donne described when he wrote,
On man, heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air,
So soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.
It is each person's intuitive understanding of the centrality of love and the transcendent nature of the couplings we make in love—all the shining beauty and dark sadness that seem irrevocably intertwined in love—on which Baross has opened a magical window through which we see the truth more poignantly, if only briefly, like a rare momentary glimpse of the face of God.
And that is why her story is good, why it makes us weep.