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Synopsis:
A horror-infused, polyphonic work about the violence and cruelty seething in a late-70s Guadalajara neighborhood
At a traveling fair, a young girl visiting with her family will ask a “serpent woman” to tell her future. The serpent woman’s answer is cryptic, but back in their neighborhood, the lives of the girl and her sister will be haunted by a ghost and a boa as their world shimmers between the real and unreal.
The Summer of the Serpent gives us a multi-faceted, multi-textured look at the sisters, their family, and their neighbors caught in the strange intense forces afflicting the neighborhood throughout that summer, much of it seemingly related from 40 years later, in more or less our own present.
Review:
I did not remember requesting a digital loan of The Summer of the Serpent from my local library, but when I received the notification that I was next in line, I decided to give this little book of stories a chance because there had to be some moment when I wanted to read it.
Reading The Summer of the Serpent was an interesting experience. The stories are about a neighborhood in Guadalajara, Mexico during the summer of 1977. The stories switch from narrator to narrator and from house to house because this is not a linear story about a single person or family but a broad collection of stories about a neighborhood. Like any neighborhood, some of the characters are quirky and some of them are cruel, but all of them have a story to tell. All of these stories are told through the eyes of an observer, a third party removed, seeing what is happening to others. A house is haunted by ghosts watching the family. A father is observed slowly disappearing. A researcher who feels like he is cut out for more than teaching summer school rereads his dissertation where he observes the mating habits of worms. This little amount of similarity is used in different ways in the nine connected scenes here, and there are definitely times when it works better than others.
The throughlines in the stories are very thin at points. There are moments when I do not understand how the scene fits in with the rest. One of the neighbors abuses his dog in a very ugly and cruel manner. The stories where he appears while abusing the animal do not have any sort of conclusion. There is no punishment, there is no lesson learned, and there is no reward at the end for the reader. The only thing that we get is cold observation and to share the narrator’s lack of understanding why this is happening. I like to think there is a point to everything in a book, especially one so short, but Cecilia Eudave lets it be known that I might be wasting my time. On one of the last pages she writes:
It’s true: Life has no plot. We come into the world without knowing why, same as we leave it. P.130
And this could also be the conclusion that she wants us to have, that there are things that cannot be explained and there are moments when we observe things in the world and we do not know why. This is the experience of the characters in this book, that they do not always understand why things happen, but sometimes this has to be accepted. The Summer of the Serpent is short and interesting, but I do feel like there could have been some more obvious connections between the stories, more of an outcome to some of the actions, an effect to the causes given here. The way that everything plays out feels a little underwhelming. After finishing this book, I still do not know why I wanted to borrow it from the library, but I do know that I am glad to have read it, even if I feel a little disappointed in the experience.
ghostvillehero 