Pablo!

by John Rechy

In a jungle village an old man sees a strange girl who has collapsed in a field. Once a holy man, he is sure she is not an evil spirit. He carries her inside despite his wife’s warning that the girl is the evil Xtabay, pretending to be lost and exhausted. The girl has fled her home in search of a mysterious boy who wandered into her village. She senses in him her own despair and loneliness and intends to follow him to the "great modern city" he was seeking. Using archetypal figures — the man, the boy, the woman—John Rechy’s Pablo! is steeped in indigenous myths and superstitions. Restless spirits roam the dark jungle howling for redemption amid the pyramids of their ancestors, witches predict doom and snakes stir ancient curses, like the disastrous loss of crops. Native religious rituals conflict dangerously with the Catholic religion. The novel is framed by a Mayan legend about the soul wandering aimlessly until the sun and moon fuse. Like the forgotten bride who longs endlessly for the elusive sun, the girl searches for the boy in the vast contemporary city. “One of the few original American writers of the last century.”—Gore Vidal "A novel with more truth in it than a carload of best-sellers.” —The Washington Post on The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez “Tense metafiction, pungent with desire and emotional cruelty … Rechy’s prose is lean and sinewy.” ―Publishers Weekly on After the Blue Hour JOHN RECHY is the author of seventeen books, including the New York Times best-sellers City of Night and Numbers, the Los Angeles Times best-sellers The Coming of the Night, The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens and The Sexual Outlaw (all from Grove Press). He is the recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature. He is the first recipient of the Los Angeles Review of Books-University of California, Riverside Lifetime Achievement Award.

Kindle Edition

Published June 10, 2018

About the author

John Rechy is an American author, the child of a Scottish father and a Mexican-American mother. In his novels he has written extensively about homosexual culture in Los Angeles and wider America, and is among the pioneers of modern LGBT literature. Drawing on his own background, he has also contributed to Chicano literature, especially with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which is taught in several Chicano literature courses in the United States. His work has often faced censorship due to its sexual content, particularly (but not solely) in the 1960s and 1970s, but books such as City of Night have been best sellers, and he has many literary admirers.

Reviews

[The Literary Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black Magic Realism

John Rechy is best known for his groundbreaking 1963 bestseller, City of Night, which burst on the scene with its bebop prose sketching the street life of a young, sought-after but elusive young man on the make. It has been said that much of the book is autobiographical.

City of Night was Rechy's literary debut, but it wasn't his first novel. That was "Pablo!" which has finally been published 70 years after 18-year-old Rechy wrote it. The title character - the only person named in the book - also appears to share autobiographical details with the author.

In magic realism, the fantastic and magical is interwoven with reality. Although magic realism could be considered as stemming from Franz Kafka’s 1915 Metamorphosis in which the harried clerk Gregor Samsa awakens one morning as an insect, the term was not coined until 1955 where it was used to describe the writings of several Latin American authors, including Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges.

Elements of magic realism include, in addition to the occurrence of the fantastical in a real-world setting (living ghosts, a beautiful girl levitating to the heavens while folding laundry (One Hundred Years of Solitude), myths and folklore, and a controlled sense of the mysterious.

Pablo! fits firmly into this category, but with its darkness carves out its own new niche - call it “Black Magic Realism”.

Using the archetypes of the man, the boy, the woman, Rechy shifts time and place to tell the tale of the mysterious boy with the longing eyes and lithe body who cannot love, the sorceries of his mother, the disquieting effect he has on those whom he meets, and the Mayan girl who obsessively seeks him just as the weeping moon seeks its lover the sun in Mayan legend.

A girl who turns into a flower, faces laugh and taunt without moving, a body leaves its head to wander during the night with animals that are restless souls of the dead, these and other magical elements occur in an otherwise realistic setting. Mayan beliefs clash dangerously with Catholicism throughout the novel.

This dark tale is a magical black diamond of a tale that cataclysmically shatters into glittering shards of mirrored glass.

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