The Orange Tree
   Carlos Fuentes
   Associate Reviewer - Deborah D. Michel
  1995 Picador Press/Harper Perennial edition, NY USA
   ISBN: 0060976527


In this rich and vivid collection of 5 novellas, our world weaves with the myths of the ancient world, brilliantly illuminating both them and ourselves. This is a highly creative and wonderfully imaginative book, fun to read which keeps you thinking long after you have turned the last page.

Deborah D. Michel writes:

If I had been paying attention, this is a book that could be judged by it's cover - a beautiful orange tree, weaving itself through the striking pictures and myths of ancient Mexico. It aptly describes these five absorbing novellas, each fascinating in it's own right yet tied loosely together forming a strong whole. Mr. Fuentes is a wonderful story teller, in this collection, as he re-writes and invents history, new myths and visions are created.

In the first one, The Two Shores, you are there with Cortez as he lands in the New World, and proceeds to make history by the conquest of Mexico. Mr. Fuentes though, adds a new and unique twist that makes this history interesting. The story is told in the person of Jeronimo de Aguila, Cortez's first interpreter. De Aguila had been washed up on that same shore, years before Hernan Cortez. Fuentes is so bold as to alter history, he creates a Castilian character on behalf of the Indians. Not so fantastic, as any Spaniard there may have felt these things, yet he gave his hero an additional voice, the language of the natives.

The second novella, Sons of the Conquistador, follows the supposed lives and deaths of Hernan Cortez's sons. Very fascinating and creative. Myth and reality again weave together to reveal new insights, historical possibilities and moral consequences.

In The Two Numantias, the Romans are fighting the Greeks on Spanish soil in the first century BC. It is fascinating how Mr. Fuentes looks at the Spanish from the Roman point of view, and the Romans from the Greek. After the Greeks were swept out of Iberia, a struggle ensued with the Hispanics and the Romans. After a long siege the Romans destroyed the Spanish city of Numantias. The intense feelings and thoughts of this time in history are imagined for us, full of vivid battles and ancient heroes as real and as perceptive as if it were today.

Next you are flying to Acapulco, Mexico, in Apollo and the Whores. Vincente Valera has come from Hollywood to Mexico to escape a re-occurring dream and live out a fantasy. He dies early in the story and continues talking to us, still a part of the drama and yet unable to act, an interesting narrator. The dream becomes reality, not at all the way he could have planned. This one is spicy and definitely for adults only.

The story, The Two Americas, begins with a Spanish sailor shipwrecked 500 years ago, somewhere west of the Canary Islands. His story is a diary that he tosses into the sea, inadvertently destroying the paradise he has come to love. The story ends in the present day with this same Genoese returning to Spain. He has a key to a house that had been closed since his ancestors, the Jews, had been expelled from Spain, half a millennium ago.

In each of these stories there is an orange tree, fruit of the old world planted and thriving in the new. Orange seeds, planted by conquistadors, tended by shipwrecked sailors, giving solace to dying men and still standing in destroyed cities. The Orange Tree, something of permanence, something of continuity, definitely worth reading.

Sad to write that as of this date The Orange Tree is out of print in the USA.

1993 in Spanish by Alfaguara Literaturas under title, El naranjo, o los circulos del tiempo
1994 translation copyright by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, USA
(04/16/00)

Deborah Michel
A RebeccasReads.com Reviewer

Reviewer's Bio:
Deborah Daubner Michel has a BA in Biology & English & wrote for the University newspaper. Her first job was teaching Physics & English at a high school in southern Michigan. When she moved to Washington State, she became active in environmental education, attaining the Executive Director chair of Wild Olympic Salmon. She has also taught classes about salmon, their habitat & restoration. Currently she is writing Biological Assessments required by the US Army Corps of Engineers for construction of marine projects in the Puget Sound. Deborah so loves reading that she'd prefer to spend money on books before food & clothes.