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Apocalyptic, lyrical, and erotically charged,
Hunger’s Brides is an epic novel of genius, obsession,
and mystery surrounding the Baroque-era Mexican nun, Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz, who at the time of her death in 1695
was arguably the greatest writer working in any European tongue—though
she never lived outside her native Mexico. Born in the shadow
of the mountain passes traversed by Cortes and his conquistadors,
Juana was a child prodigy whose beauty and wit provoked a
sensation at the vice-regal court in Mexico City. At nineteen,
though still a royal favorite, she chose to enter a convent.
In the twenty years after she left the palace, Juana created
plays, theological arguments, and graceful, often sensuous
poetry—insisting upon a life of the mind for women,
while jousting with the enforcers of the Inquisition, like
a New World Galileo. Then, at forty, Juana made the most astonishing
gesture of her dramatic life: she signed a vow of silence
in her own blood, five years before succumbing to plague.
While maintaining a portion of its narrative
gaze fixed on the baroque era, it is in the contemporary world
that debut novelist Paul Anderson begins his epic work. In
the dead of a frigid winter night, a man escapes from an apartment
in which a young woman lies mortally wounded. In his hands
he’s clutching a box he has found on her table addressed
to him. He is Donald Gregory, a once-respected college professor
and serial adulterer, whose latest affair has left his academic
career in ruins. The bleeding woman is Beulah Limosneros,
one of his students, and for a brief time his lover. Brilliant,
erratic, and driven, she had disappeared into Mexico two years
earlier, following her growing obsession with Sor Juana. As
a police investigation closes in around Gregory, he pieces
together the contents of the box, fearful of incriminating
evidence Beulah may have assembled against him.Inside it he
finds translated poems of Sor Juana; a travel diary; research
notes on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Inquisition;
journal entries about him; and a strange manuscript, part
biography and part fiction, composed largely in Sor Juana’s
own mesmerizing voice.
In Hunger’s Brides, Paul Anderson
plumbs a mystery that has intrigued writers as diverse as
Robert Graves, Octavio Paz, Diane Ackerman, and Eduardo Galeano:
Why did a writer of such gifts silence herself? In his remarkable
debut, Anderson performs a dramatic unfolding of three intimate
journeys: a great poet’s withdrawal from the world; a
man’s forced march to self-knowledge; and a woman mystic’s
pilgrimage into modern Mexico, where the bones of the past
continually intrude into a present built on the ruins of the
vanquished.
Paul Anderson spent twelve years
writing Hunger’s Brides, his first novel. He
lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where his book has received
the top award for literary fiction in the 2005 Alberta Book
Awards.
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