“Hunger’s Brides: A Novel of the Baroque”, by Paul Anderson

 

1376 pages, Da Capo Press, ISBN-13: 978-0786715411

Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides: A Novel of the Baroque is as baroque as its subject matter. Donald Gregory was once a respected college professor who had a penchant for seducing students; one winter’s evening he visits the apartment of one Beulah Limosneros, a student and former lover, only to find her there, dying. This in itself is a shock, as she had disappeared two years prior when, chasing her obsession for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Sister Joan Agnes of the Cross), she had traveled to Mexico on her quest. In a panic, he seizes the box he finds and flees into the cold night. With the police closing in around him, Gregory examines the contents of this box and finds a wealth of treasures connected with the sainted Juana: Beulah’s travel journal, her research notes on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Inquisition, private diary entries (concerning him) and a strange manuscript about Sor Juana. But who was Sor Juana? Why was Beulah obsessed with her? And where does Gregory fit in to all this?

As one can tell by this thumbnail sketch, Hunger’s Brides is not easy to quantify: part mystery, part history, part poetic, part novelistic – there's a lot going on here, for Paul Anderson has written an encyclopedic epic about this little-known (outside of Mexico) nun/poetess of the late 17^th Century and her obsessive 20^th Century researcher. At almost 1400 pages and weighing almost 5 pounds, Hunger’s Brides is reminiscent of the old social conscience potboilers of the 19^th Century: think Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, or War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, or even In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, each of whom not only created memorable characters and complex plots, but also lengthy social observations on topics which did not necessarily advance the plot, but which got the author’s viewpoints across, often at their own expanse (perhaps Anderson should have followed Proust’s example and published this many-layered novel filled with history and poetry in several volumes?).

But I suspect that both Anderson and the editor fell under Sor Juana’s spell and could not bear to pare much from her extraordinary life. This illegitimate daughter of a 17^th Century Mexican rancher was a genius with a mind that today still defies explanation (hence her enduring fascination). Her wit, her intelligence, her writings and, not least, her spirituality lead the Viceroy of New Spain to demand the teenage Juana’s presence in Mexico City, but she left after only a few years to enter one of the most restrictive convents in the city, where she felt she would not be distracted from her writing. Her beauty and brilliance made her convent cell a popular meeting place for the intelligentsia of New Spain, but between visits she wrote quite unchaste poetry that took the world by storm. Then, suddenly, she stopped, never to write again. This mystery has entranced scholars form her day to ours, it entranced Anderson enough to write this brick of a book and, by the time you (eventually) finish, it will entrance you, too.