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Drawn to Mexico
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11807 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1994 |
1,584 Words |
| Author
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Brahm Eiley
Brahm Eiley is a free-lance writer based in Toronto. |
CONSIDER THIS, SENORA
Harriet Doerr
New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993
241 pp., $21.95
For those who dream of one day writing a great novel, Harriet Doerr's story is the stuff of legend. Born in 1910 in Pasadena, California, Doerr left Smith College in 1928 to get married. Inveterate travelers, she and her husband were ultimately drawn to Mexico, where they lived for fifteen years. When her husband died, Doerr returned to school, earning a degree in European history from Stanford University.
It was at Stanford that Doerr, then in her late sixties, started to write short stories. She recalled that, at the time, she "didn't feel brave enough to do a novel." But with the encouragement of classmates and professors, she continued. The fact that Doerr started writing so late in life is impressive and intriguing, but it is the quality of her work that is most remarkable.
In 1982, Doerr won the Transatlantic Review-Henfield Foundation Award for three stories published in small literary magazines. These stories would form the basis of Stones for Ibarra, her first novel, which was published in 1984. Stones for Ibarra is the story of a man, dying of cancer, and his wife, who leave the safety of their home in California and head to a small village in Mexico to reopen a copper mine. Set in the era when Mexico's villages were still traditional and fantastic and not yet ridden with Club Meds, the novel explores the subject of loss. Slowly and often indirectly, Stones for Ibarra assaults the reader's emotional defenses with subtlety and knowledge. The novel, acclaimed by reviewers in such prestigious publications as the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times--as well as by the dean of American storytelling, the late Wallace Stegner--received the American Book Award for First Fiction.
Americans in Mexico
Doerr's long-awaited second book, Consider This, Senora, is a miraculous tale that will not disappoint the reader: It moves even more deftly and completely around life's circle. In this story, set in the early 1960s, Doerr returns to small-town Mexico. American expatriates Sue Ames, a young woman who has recently divorced her husband, and Bud Loomis, middle-aged, gruff, and secretly on the run from the Internal Revenue Service, meet by chance and together buy a piece of land outside the tiny village of La Luz. The
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