La estación del pantano

by Yuri Herrera

Este libro inventa una hipó ¿qué sucedió durante el año y medio en que Benito Juárez, quien acabaría siendo el primer presidente indígena de México, vivió desterrado en Nueva Orleans? Es en ese «hueco marcado por el punto y aparte» en la autobiografía de Juárez donde comienza la narración. Acompañado por un pequeño grupo de exiliados políticos, Juárez desembarca en 1853 en esa ciudad hedionda que, situada a orillas de un pantano, los absorbe como una esponja. En ella se rinden al lodo, a las flores de jazmín, a la música, a la extrañeza del idioma y al insoportable verano, pero, sobre todo, se dan de bruces con la descarnada realidad del comercio de seres humanos, un mercado que nunca se detiene. Descubrirán que Nueva Orleans es una colmena de identidades heterogéneas donde se venden mujeres apresadas por las calles y donde el capitalismo muestra su pulsión primitiva, la más esperpéntica.

La estación del pantano muestra ese tiempo detenido e incierto que precede siempre a la acción de unos cuantos audaces para tratar de invertir el orden establecido. Y lo hace con la libertad arrolladora y la transgresión que caracterizan la escritura de Herrera, gracias a la cual consigue que nuestra lengua suene como una lengua liberada del diccionario que decide salir a dar un paseo.

Yuri Herrera bucea esta vez en la Historia para ofrecernos una novela magistral que, con una gran potencia fabuladora al tiempo que firmemente asentada en la investigación archivística, logra dar con una clave secreta de un presente a la intemperie.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Spanish Literature, Literary Fiction, Race, Audiobook, The United States Of America

144 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 31, 2022

About the author

Born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970, Yuri Herrera studied Politics in Mexico, Creative Writing in El Paso and took his PhD in literature at Berkeley. His first novel to appear in English, Signs Preceding the End of the World, was published to great critical acclaim in 2015 and included in many Best-of-Year lists, including The Guardian‘s Best Fiction and NBC News’s Ten Great Latino Books, going on to win the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. He is currently teaching at the Tulane University, in New Orleans.

Reviews

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Fanny Lou Hamer said: "Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free". Imagining 18 undocumented months in the life of a 47 year old Mexican revolutionary gives us a book where 1850's New Orleans, powered by slave trade and cotton production, is the main, murky character
And that he didn’t actually have his story straight; that there was no simple, coherent, communicable tale to tell; that there were too many betrayals, small ones or secret ones but betrayals nonetheless; and that he had a right to keep them to himself, in all the tongues he now knew.

Loosely following Benito Juarez his undocumented exile in New Orleans before he became the first indigenous president of Mexico, Yuri Herrera brings us a city that is bustling. The writing in Season of the Swamp reminded me somewhat of what Éric Vuillard did in The War of the Poor; a detached, almost documentary like take on a historical moment.

Slavery sales are documented in terrible detail, contrasted with new opera openings and ongoing trade in New Orleans. Over 1 million Africans past the port of New Orleans, and became "hands" in the jargon of "brokers", erasing the bodies and persons attached to these means of mostly cotton production. The market never stops someone wryly notes. We also have visions of Mardi Grass and hippodrome visits, gambling, brothels and fires, forming a frothy, feverish marshy background to the story. Pestilence, especially in summer when everyday gets hotter are rampant dangers, culminating in fever induced dream sequences that are wild, including vampire battle scenes. There are clear and gross injustices, The law is so awful casually injected in the narrative, including not only slavery but for instance also a father being arrested for trying to burry his dead child. Herrera makes here an interesting juxtaposition between the historical struggle for freedom and emancipation and the individual, undocumented daily struggles against systemic injustice.

Creole culture and music are all over present in this novel, and the alleged main characters in my view don't get much depth. At times I felt that, similar to their experiences in a new land with a foreign tongue and customs, I only got 60-70% of what really was going on.
I agree with what one of the character says: It’s quite complicated, if you want to be on the safe side just remember on the one side are the whites and on the other side everyone else, and the novel intrigued me more than that I fully and wholly enjoyed it, although the linkage between freedom struggle internationally and constitutionally and on an individual level are clearly well executed.

Quotes:
But what is the plan, he asked. What is it that we want to go back for?

Money was one word he did know, a key word if ever there was

Some of us use obscene language even without speaking

...we have fewer rights each day, in case you haven’t noticed

I come here to listen. Not cause I got something to say, just cause it’s beautiful to hear these kids doing something besides obey orders.

We got to survive anyway we can and being alive is already winning, the way I see it.

We didn’t see it coming. Didn’t see their fangs till they’d sunk them in.

What does that drawing mean?
Exactly what it looks like: that moving forward doesn’t mean you abandon what’s left behind.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

shortlisted for the 2025 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize
Finalist for the 45th Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction

How ironic is it to be exiled by a tyrant, only to end up in a city full of captured humans.

Season of the Swamp (2024) is Lisa Dillman's translation of La estación del pantano (2022) by Yuri Herrera, and published by And Other Stories.

I previously read the fascinating Signs Preceding the End of the World by the same publisher/translator/author combination, winner of the Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.

The novel is based on the 18 months, beginning in late December 1853, which Benito Juárez spent, in his mid 40s, in exile, from Mexico, in New Orleans (where Herrera now lives), before returning to the country as part of the movement to oust the Conservative President Antonio López de Santa Anna and becoming, in 1858 and until his death in 1872, the first Indigenous president of Mexico.

His New Orleans exile is a period recorded in the history books but about which little is known, Juárez himself simply noting his arrival in and departure from the city in his autobiography Apuntes para mis hijos (Notes for my children).

“I remained [in Havana] until 18 December [1853], when I left for New Orleans, where I arrived on the 29th day of that month.
“I lived in that city until 20 June 1855, when I headed to Acapulco to lend my services to the campaign . . .”

The author has explained in an interview in the Chicago Review of Books how he was able to draw on his experience writing both speculative fiction (Ten Planets: Stories) and historical narrative (A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire) to produce this novel:

On the one hand, I had absolute freedom to do whatever I want, and on the other hand, I had this book that was limited and empowered by facts, documents. I had these two tools that were perfect for this kind of book. It was about the research on Juárez’s life and the research on News Orleans life, but also there was a void I had to fill, not just with information but with my imagination based on my research.

His reception on disembarking from the packet boat had been a foretaste of all that was to come: waiting and waiting and not knowing words and not being seen and learning the secret names of things.

The novel, told in the third person but from Juárez's perspective (or rather that of a very close observer) opens with his and two companions' arrival, by packet boat, in the city, and a scene they witness before they plunge into the confusing tumult of New Orleans.

The badges dragged the man from the ship, hurled him down the gangplank, and he fell in front of them and then attempted to stand, but the badges conquered him with clubs and he didn’t defend himself from their blows, because his hands were clasping a treasured object to his chest. One of the badges torturing him said Drop it. They didn’t speak the language, but that’s what the badge was saying. Drop it! shouted the one who seemed to be the boss, and then he insulted the man; they didn’t recognize the word but they recognized the language of hate. But the man did not drop it, not until three badges wrenched one arm and three wrenched the other, and the object fell to the ground and popped open, and the boss picked it up, and though he’d no doubt held objects like this one before, he was astonished to see that it was a compass.

In that frozen moment in which the badges looked at the boss and the boss looked at the compass and the man looked at the boss holding the compass and nobody knew what to do, he caught a glimpse of the tattoo on the man’s back, on his shoulder blade, a glyph of a bird walking one
way while looking the other.

Then time unfroze, the boss snapped the compass shut, turned, and walked off, and his badges lifted the man up only to drag him off like a beast once more and then disappear into the throng.

Then everything kicked into action: the cranes hoisting sailboats, the ships loaded with hay and coal, the cotton—so much cotton, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bales of cotton—the mountains of produce being unloaded, the smell of fresh produce, the smell of rotting produce, the promiscuity of incomprehensible voices, the people bustling here and there, the smell of the people bustling here and there; to the left, dark water specked with lights; ahead, the dim lights of lampposts; to the right, the twinkling lights of the city.

This sense of not knowing words (in Englush) but inferring them is a mechanism Herrera uses very effectively to convey the way that Juárez gradually learns to deciphere the language but also the culture of a vibrant and complex, indded overwhelming, city. And the arrestee reappears later in the story, with his distinctive tattoo, a Sankofa bird a recurring motif in other's Juárez encounters.

Herrera used digitised copies of The Times-Picayune from the period for the researched part of his novel, and this is another narrative tool he employs very effectively, Juárez desperate for news from home to see how the opposition to the conservative dictator Santa Anna is building while he is exiled, but the headlines and images in the local press also function to introduce him, and us, to New Orleans:

A few words he knew, others he intuited. He spent that second day carrying the paper back and forth between guard posts without anyone demanding it back. He was able to decipher ships' schedules and cargos; ads for dance academies and moving companies and guesthouses (they already had a place to stay, though, at the Cincinnati, no less); news of a woman—"a lover of the arts," the article called her—who had stolen a statue from someone's house; a story about a Spanish ballerina, "Señorita Soto," who'd performed several numbers never before seen outside of Spain; the arrest of a man accused of obtaining money under false pretenses (how elegant it sounded); several carriage drivers detained for furious driving (so beautifully put); a woman who had stabbed her husband; an article about Sonora, noting that it was a very rich state and that soon an expedition from California would set out to quash the Apaches (to steal Sonora, more like it, though that's not what it said); cures for gonorrhea; rewards for runaway slaves; and an advertisement that destroyed him, for a Slave Warehouse. The ad was accompanied by a wee little drawing of a man who was supposed to be a slave, with a bundle tied to a stick over one shoulder, as if he were traveling—as if the man were doing the one thing it was utterly impossible for him to do. His eyes remained fixed on the image like it was the longest article in the paper.

"All that, in a place you could cover with a gob of spit. Unbelievable, isn't it?"

This last interjection from a Spanish businessman who introduces himself to Juárez and his companions and serves as a pathway into the city, and in particular to the community of those, for whom the Sankofa bird serves as a symbol, attempting to help the enslaved. And while Juárez's political future and rumours from Mexico form a backdrop to the novel, it is the slavery on which the economy of the city, and indeed the wider American nation, is founded which dominates the story.

A novel where atmosphere dominates over plot, and a wonderful recreation of a time and place, but with important political messages.

Extract:
here

Further interviews:
Bomb Magazine
LA Review of Books

[Sarah-Hope · Rating 5 out of 5]

CW: enslavement

I want to call Yuri Herrera's Season of the Swamp "a fever-dream of a novel." I may have used that line before, but, in this case, it is so apt that I'm going with it. Season of the Swamp is built around an 18-month period during which Benito Juárez, exiled from of Mexico, lived in New Orleans. Not much is known about this period, so the book presents Herrera's imaginings about that period—and his imaginings ring true and are presented in downright lovely prose.

Part of the fever-dream nature of this novel is that it includes a summer epidemic of yellow fever, during which Juárez does have fever dreams. But even when Juárez is hale, the novel proceeds in a dream-like fashion—which seems to me to be utterly appropriate given the tale the novel tells.

Herrera's prose is perfectly suited to the time and to Juárez's situation. Occasionally, there are long, undulating sentences: "He got out [of a staged bear fight] as fast as he could feeling that these were experiences he had no right to, the roaring distress of the bears, but also the portent of the drums, but also the swampiness of those chaotic days as well as the swamp-swamp beneath his feet, but also that trumpet like a spike of wind at the coffeeshop, the brothel, but the pianos, but the sound, the unbearable sound hammering his brain so loud that when he finally reached the quadrant [where he lived] he didn't even recognize it, it had all become the clamor of celebration, it was all foreign, he turned down a street, did not know it, turned down two others, did not know them, walked on for several blocks, slipped down a alley, which he suddenly realized was not an alley but the walkway to a house, which led to the silence, and the stillness, of an inner courtyard." Herrera doesn't overdo it; this is not the usual sentence of the novel, but it fits its moment well, sweeping readers along sharing the overwhelm and disorientation of Juárez.

**This is a good moment to note the deftness of the translation done by Lisa Dillman. Her linguistic flexibility and precision perfectly matches Juárez's.**

If you're curious about Juárez's life, the Wikipedia write-up is clear and will give you a sense of Juárez's role in history: "Of Zapotec ancestry, he was the first indigenous president of Mexico[a] and the first democratically elected indigenous president in the postcolonial Americas. A member of the Liberal Party, he previously held a number of offices, including the governorship of Oaxaca and the presidency of the Supreme Court. During his presidency he led the Liberals to victory in the Reform War and in the Second French intervention in Mexico." There's more, but this gives a sense of the scope of his abilities and life story.

In season Season of the Swamp, Juárez is neither statesman nor soldier. He's an exile making his living via whatever work he can find—cigar rolling, delivering fliers and other printed material—struggling to pay for even basic accommodations. He and his compañero Pepe are learning New Orleans with by going on long walks, drinking endless cups of coffee, and attempting to avoid the attentions of the law.

Herrera's Juárez is attuned to the injustices of the time: an economy built around the buying and selling of human beings, the nuances of a society in which one's position was determined by the color of one's skin. Slaves are no longer being "imported" into the U.S., so there's a detestable grow-your-own emphasis on breeding and the production of children as "endless capital." Just let that sink in.

Season of the Swamp is a deceptively quick read—which is good, as it merits more than one reading. Give yourself over to it.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this work of historical fiction, Yuri Herrera has recreated the time spent by Benito Juarez, the future first indigenous president of Mexico, in New Orleans. In the 1850s, Juarez, and other rebels, had been forced to leave their country and spent time thinking about home, what change they wanted in Mexico and learning/experiencing this American Southern ante bellum world. Much that he saw was new to him and makes for an interesting view for the reader. Since he was Mexican and not light skinned, Juarez had to live by the color rules of the city.

This story is gritty, sometimes fun in its pictures of cultural events, at times almost hallucinatory, and enlightening to see how he views this new city and land.

how ironic it is to be exiled by a tyrant, only to end up in a city full
of captured humans (loc 234)

And captured is what he, Juarez/Herrera calls the slaves throughout this book. He is caught up in their place-or lack of place in this city. This novel reveals a man at odds with himself, on the edge of something very different, but also exploring what this city has to show him.

I enjoyed this quite a lot and plan to seek out the other collaborations between Herrera and translator Lisa Dillman. This introduced me to a man and time I knew nothing about save for his name.

Thanks to Graywolf Press and NetGalley for an eARC of this book.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is as close to perfection as a book can get. In this wildly imaginative and rollicking tale, Herrera has imagined how Benito Juárez, future president of Mexico, spent his 18 months of exile in 1850’s New Orleans. Bringing New Orleans to life through all that Juárez witnesses on the streets, reads in the papers, and hears in passing, the city becomes a character all of its own.

Though there’s a lively and spirited tone to the text and the city’s general shenanigans, it is the 1850s and the setting is the Deep South. Herrera doesn’t shy away from the horrors of this time and place, but places Juárez smack dab in the middle of it all, implying through the meaning and symbolism of the Sankofa bird that this exposure to the American slave trade acted as an influence for how the future president would run his own country when the time came.

Herrera’s writing, through Dillman’s brilliant translation, is something else. It’s playful, it’s smart, it’s oh so alive. I need more books like this that thrill with their language but have the intrigue and action to match—-ok there’s actually no real plot in this but you’d never notice because there is so much going on !!

I can’t recommend it enough, certainly a top read of the year for me.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second collaboration between Yuri Herrera and Lisa Dillman, his translator, that I've read, and I'm thrilled to know there are more out there. Here is an imagining of the time spent mid-19th century in New Orleans by Benito Juárez, who later served as the first indigenous President of Mexico. Imbued with his trademark beautiful prose, this deceptively slim novel brings to life NOLA in all its beauty and decadence, where sewage "flowed al fresco," and the market for slaves thrived. Also with his economy of language, he is able to convey the effects all this had upon the young Juárez. Elegiac and yet powerful.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this novel is interesting: What really happened during Benito Juarez' 18 months of exile in New Orleans, just prior to his revolutionary return to Mexico and his ascent as that country's first indigenous President?

What Yuri Herrera has done with that prompt is variably effective. What comes most vividly to life is the New Orleans of 1853-1855. It's a great portrait of a city that has always been proudly eccentric and outré. Unfortunately, the choice was made to inform the reader - simultaneous to Juarez' own education - through a sequence of very expository "conversations" he has at random with a variety of characters. As effective as they are at getting detail across (historical, geographical, cultural, political, etc.), a fair percentage of these chats feel stilted and unnatural as a result. More Showing and less veiled Telling would have been even more powerful.

At 136 pages, this is Herrera's longest continuous narrative and the only one that surpasses novella heft. It is also better than the average new fiction on offer today, yet my least favorite of the four. As always, it is provided in phenomenally good translation by Lisa Dillman.

3.5 stars

[Tom Mooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5. Herrera always entertains. This, a speculative history of Benito Juarez's time in exile in New Orleans, is a challenging narrative to follow at times. But where Herrera excels is the atmosphere of a chaotic city, as Juarez makes his temporary home among the pirates, privateers, Creoles, firestarters, escaped slaves, sailors, spies and whores. When it's good, Season of the Swamp is magnificent, but it does suffer from a lack of drive or peril at times.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adored Signs Preceding the End of the World, so when I saw an unfamiliar novel by Yuri Herrara I had to read it immediately. I find his writing, and the way that it is translated, truly beautiful and intensely atmospheric. In Season of the Swamp, Herrara vividly evokes mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans as observed by Benito Juárez, who will later become the first indigenous president of Mexico. He and a few friends are temporarily exiled to this strange and fetid city. The place has elements of beauty (notably the jasmine flowers), as well as being haunted by the pervasive horror of slavery:

A trader forced one of the captured to lift a boulder with both hands, then with one hand, then to lift the trader himself. Strong but docile, the man touted; plus, this one even knew how to pick cotton and cut cane.
"And if that's not enough," added the trader, speaking at a normal volume but leaning in as if confiding a secret, "the boy's green, born in Africa. Yes, I know, I know, but shhh... what's a dealer to do if a boat carrying a shipment from Africa accidentally sails off course? Hmm? Deny my customers the merchandise? No. Y'all rule the roost around here; there's a reason this market for hands is the biggest one in the country, and this country is the best one in the world."
"Hands?"
"That's what they call them on the plantations."
Hands. Hands with no person. But, of course, each pair of hands had a person. They could convince themsleves that what they were doing wasn't being done to a person if they called them hands. But hands come at the end of a person.
And they were chained. Here, of all places. They could have done it anywhere. But the owners had decided to do it here: here, where the captured used to gather in song; here, where they kept the memory alive, where they were more than just hands, this was the place they decided to sell them like cattle.

Season of the Swamp is a portrait of a city rather than a plot-led narrative. Juarez observes, contemplates, and plans. With him, the reader absorbs a powerful sense of place and bitter tastes of cruelty and injustice.

[Willow Heath]

Yuri Herrera is a Mexican author who lives and works in New Orleans, and Season of the Swamp reads like his dedication to that messy city and its even messier history, as well as to Mexico's first indigenous president, Benito Juarez, who is this historical novel's protagonist. Juarez was exiled from Mexico for several years before his eventual presidency, and during that exile he spent almost two years in New Orleans.

But we know nothing about that period. Herrera imagines that he must have met up with other exiles, and while there he would have grappled with disease and the shock of seeing the trade and ownership of human beings. This is what Season of the Swamp depicts, presented both lyrically and with a touch of surrealism. This is a short historical novel that packs a punch, reads like a dream, and presents us with many beautiful truths.

My full thoughts: https://booksandbao.com/essential-mod...

[Yahaira · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I enjoyed some of the language play and the idea of immersion, this eventually became a flat story/character with way too much exposition for me to care. I guess if you need to be told 'slavery bad' I got the book for you.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a brief but important preface Herrera explains how Benito Juárez, who was to become one of Mexico’s greatest political leaders, spent eighteen months in exile in New Orleans in 1853.
Conveniently for Herrera, no history book holds any record of his days in the city, so the short novel becomes speculative.

It was New Orleans that drew me to the book, though I have read Herrera before, and indeed, it was New Orleans that emerged as the highlight.

Though familiar with Mexico’s corruption, he was not prepared to be beaten and robbed by the police on arrival, or to directly experience the slave trade at its height.

Mardi Gras began to be celebrated in 1730 in a Big Easy that was only founded twelve years before, but it was in the mid-1800s until street processions took place. The atmosphere of the carnival is certainly evident here, as Benito dreams of reform, liberation and justice and an end to slavery.

[Ruben · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 - The real star of this lively novella is the chaotic city of New Orleans. It's 1853 and future Mexican president Benito Juarez spends 2 years of exile in the city. Little is known about his time there, so Yuri Herrera can freely speculate how Juarez and his friends survived, wondered, made a living and admired the city, with its crimes, its music and rhythm and its wild and elusive inhabitants. The plot doesn't matter that much, but it's fun all the same.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is an imagining of what future Mexican President Benito Juárez might have experienced during his eighteen months in exile in New Orleans, 1853-1855. He experiences racial prejudice and observes the demeaning ways in which slavery is exploited. He and his colleagues plan to reenter Mexico, and their plans for returning are part of the story. Little is known of this time in Juarez’s life, so the author is free to create his story with few constraints. One of the strengths of the book is its depiction of New Orleans. The author brings the city to life, depicting its diversity, music, food, and multi-cultural elements. I would have preferred a little more depth to the characters, and how their future actions were influenced by their time in New Orleans.

[José Miguel Tomasena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy buena novela. Como siempre, lo mas distintivo de Yuri es la libertad con la que escribe. Cumple aquello que decía Nicanor Parra de que el poeta ha de inventar su propio diccionario.
En esta ocasión, la novela discurre sobre lo que pudo haber pasado en Nueva Orleans durante los meses en que Benito Juárez y otros exiliados liberales mexicanos vivieron ahí.
Me gustó particularmente la recreación de la época en la que se comercia personas. Y las redes ya existían para la liberación.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Season of the Swamp is precisely the kind of counterfactual experiment I love: Benito Juarez spent his 18-month exile from Mexico in New Orleans but we know almost nothing of his time there. Herrera paints a vivid picture of Juarez’s days where he plots to liberate his homeland while confronting the barbarity of the slave trade in the United States.

[Monica | readingbythebay · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5. I received an ARC from the Graywolf galley club – thank you!

This short novel is an imagining of how real-life historical figure Benito Juárez might have spent his time while exiled in 1800s New Orleans prior to becoming the first indigenous President of México.

We follow Juárez as he adapts to life as an anonymous migrant, working odd jobs to pay the rent, trying to duck a rampant yellow fever epidemic, and being shocked by his close-up introduction to American slavery, which he views as abhorrent. It was swampy, as promised!

Writing this review while currently reading My Friends by Hisham Matar, another excellent book that centers on characters in exile, reminds me how much I love it when my reading choices intersect.

And ahhh the prose! Herrera’s witing style is brilliant! He is linguistically playful like Nabakov!

I had a fun time with this one and would definitely read more by this author/translator team. This is out October 1st!

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ended up reading this over a long weekend. It's a neat, small story of a group of Mexican exiles over a long plague ridden summer in New Orleans, and how they end up coming into themselves and going to the next stage of their journey. This was provided as part of Graywolf's galley club, and is due to come out this fall; definitely worth picking up.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hazy, sleepy, well written and translated short novel of speculative historical fiction.

1853, Swampy New Orleans is alive with lawlessness, brothels, human trafficking and a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped for victory over the Mexican dictatorship.

[Zoe Forbdshsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

It gives you very little explanation, you sink into the disparate sludge of New Orleans with Benito, you fall for Thisbee, and her yellow gloves. This book makes cohesive what is un-swallowable, Yuri Herrera makes soup, or gumbo.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

what are we willing to ignore, or let atrophy, for the right to indolence. what a monstrous thing, comfort.

yuri herrera’s writing never fails to thrill. his sixth book in english translation, season of the swamp (la estación del pantano) is a novel of speculative history, focused on the eighteen months benito juárez spent in exile in new orleans in the mid-nineteenth century (before becoming president of mexico in 1858). vividly conveying the sights, sounds, and smells of the sweltering city (where herrera currently teaches), season of the swamp imagines juárez’s time there, of which next to nothing is known:

“apart from two or three vague anecdotes that appear in multiple biographies of juárez, no one knows what happened in new orleans. it is this interval, this gap, in which the following story, or history, takes place. all the information about the city, the markets that sold human beings, as well as those that sold food, the crimes committed daily and the fires set weekly, can be corroborated by historical documents. the true account of what happened, this one, cannot.”

as with the mexican author’s other books, season of the swamp brims with atmospherics and herrera’s always-impressive use of language. set against the backdrop of southern slavery and human trafficking, herrera’s novel portrays louisiana’s largest city as a sultry place where race, culture, and a certain seediness combine to vigorous effect. season of the swamp is peopled by a motley crew of shady characters (and the most deliriously amusing fever dream!), each of whom lends dramatic flair to the future liberal leader’s temporary stateside stay.

“look, madam, look, sir, i’m saying madam and sir because the time has come to acknowledge that no one is invulnerable just because they’ve got a noble title. madam, sir: you can believe whatever you like, the pope can believe whatever he likes. but this”—he points toward the kitchen—“this is not about beliefs. this is about the two of you being straight-up motherfuckers.” another slug from the bottle, and then he adds, “as is the pope.”

*translated from the spanish by lisa dillman (barba, halfon, quintana, mediano, del árbol, filloy, et al.)

[Luis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Otro librito del bueno de Yuri Herrera. Este, a no ser que te apasione los textos históricos, y sepas algo sobre la historia mexicana, se hace un poco más complejo de entrar. Es por ello que, pese a tener la gran mano de Yuri Herrera detrás, y tener capítulos como el del sueño de Benito cuando es un cazavampiros socialista - tremendo -, solo le doy un 4/5.

Sin duda no es el mejor libro para entrar a conocer a Yuri Herrera, pero no deja de tener ese ambiente y ese encanto del verbo que lo acompaña, las descripciones y, por supuesto, los maravillosos diálogos que se quedan por mucho tiempo entre las orejas.

[Manuel Gil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yuri Herrera pode facer de todo e todo o fai moi ben. Unha novela histórica imaxinativa e ben chula

[Oscreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was extraordinary. Yuri Herrera is everything.

[Jim Beatty · Rating 4 out of 5]

There will always be pirates, they're just better dressed these days.

[Mark Haunschild · Rating 4 out of 5]

A one sitter. Like all of Herrera’s novels this was a propulsive read. A terrifying view of US slavery auctions and moral failing in creole Louisiana, 1855. A glimpse at a time before Benito Juarez would return to Mexico and lead the Mexican liberal Reform War. The project is similar to Mathias Ènard’s, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants. Where Ènard treats an unknown time in Michelangelo’s life when he lived in Constantinople, Herrera treats a brief period when Juarez lived in New Orleans. Seasons was not my favorite of Herrera’s novels, that would have to be Signs Preceding the End of the World, but it was still a wonderful read.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe a long tad short of four stars as this was not my kind of slow moving read, even though it is a short book.

[mari · Rating 4 out of 5]

yuri herrera has some of the most creative and interesting language use i’ve encountered, i love! how! he! uses! words !!! this didn’t live up to signs preceding or kingdom cons for me—it felt too tidy. but it was still excellent because, well, it’s yuri herrera

[joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love herrera’s prose. it’s so musical

[Kip Kyburz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully written book that charts a brief interlude in the life of Benito Jaurez, a man born in Oaxaca to indigenous parents who would eventually rise to become the first indigenous president in Mexican history. It follows his brief exile to New Orleans where he gathers supporters and information prior to his return to Mexico. The book doubles as a paean to the dichotomy of New Orleans, a city of decadence and filth, freedom and slavery, opportunity and crushing poverty. Herrera himself has lived in New Orleans for over a decade and much of his observations come from a place of love for this city and an acknowledgement of its dark past. As stated before, this is very much an interlude, there is no substantial resolution to any great problems, but merely a snapshot of a certain man at a certain time.