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language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 13.11.25-20.11.25
my short, glib review of Michael J. DeLuca’s The Jaguar Mask is that if you’re going to spend — reportedly — twelve years doing research in order to be able to effectively write a book set in Guatemala you should probably spend some of that time learning Spanish. concomitantly, if you are a publisher releasing a book that incorporates Spanish and your editor(s) do(es) not speak Spanish you should find a copyeditor who does. that way maybe you’ll avoid having an Italian narcotrafficante show up in the narration (“She squeezed Cristina’s hand in the worldwise way of a gentleman narcotrafficante inviting a woman to dance”) when you mean to be invoking the hackneyed specter of the narcotraficante.
my longer, slightly less glib review is: on one level this book is quite good (eventually). I found the first half to be kind of a slog, but in the latter half it picks up, and in the second half DeLuca does a much better job of increasing the tension, developing both protagonists, and adding nuance to the politics of the first half — the climax of the novel is genuinely gripping. unfortunately, it’s marred by basically everything about the setup.
The Jaguar Mask follows, primarily, Felipe K’icab, a Maya (illegal) taxi driver in Guatemala City who is drawn unwillingly into a murder investigation being conducted by an ex-secret police operative. secondarily (more prominently in the second half), we also follow Cristina, an artist struggling to scrape together a living selling to tourists and to escape the visions that torment her — including of her mother’s murder, a collateral victim in the assassination Felipe is investigating. Felipe’s investigation is conducted against the backdrop of civil unrest following a massacre in a Maya village variously named as “Totonícapan” and “Totonicapán”; throughout the novel, Felipe and Cristina grapple with the history of Guatemala in the late 20th century, particularly the civil war and Maya genocide, although it does so in curiously distanced form, using pseudonyms for major figures in the genocidal government that came to power with the CIA-backed coup that overthrew Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.
the title alludes to the most prominent speculative element in the novel, namely that Felipe is not, in fact, human: he is a “nagual”/nāhualli, glossed also in the novel with the Yucatec Maya term wayob (which is actually plural), a shape-shifting being able to move between human and animal forms; Felipe’s “natural” form is that of a jaguar, and he dons masks in order to take a range of human appearances. already this presents a problem: DeLuca is not Maya. what is at stake, then, in his use of the way — in his writing a novel of the reemergence or rediscovery of Maya supernatural beings for revolutionary purposes?
this speaks to a more general problem with the novel, which is: what business is it of DeLuca as an apparently monolingual anglophone US citizen to be diagnosing The Problem With Guatemalan Politics? the novel is full of pronouncements like this —
“That’s why nobody talks about the war.” He slowed to dodge around a tuktuk struggling up the hill. “They think not talking is keeping it from happening again. We all keep our heads down, and people like Molinero keep on like always.”
— and every single time I think: maybe your sister, who lives in Guatemala and has a Guatemalan partner, could get away with this, but where do you get off speaking through these characters? the constant incorrect — or clunkily performative — Spanish exacerbates this; every time someone is referred to as smoking a “cigarrita” (presumably meant to be a cigarette; actually a spittlebug, a type of insect) or someone speaking in Spanish to another Spanish-speaker throws the word “cabrón” into their dialogue the result is that I grow that much more dubious of every other aspect of the novel’s portrayal of Guatemala. there’s a newspaper referred to consistently as “the Diary”, presumably because DeLuca knew that newspapers are sometimes called Diario and used the English cognate.
the result is a book that is trying to engage seriously with Guatemalan history but ends up feeling, to me, like a USAmerican caricature of a generic War-Ravaged and Corrupt Latin American Failed State.
moods: adventurous, dark, grimy, mysterious, reflective, tense