A Hunger for Connection

By Barbara Hoffert -- Library Journal, 06/01/2005

First novelist Paul Anderson has started out big: Hunger's Brides, his richly textured evocation of Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and modern-day follower Beulah Limosneros (see review, p. 114), is 1400 pages long. Yet it's as engaging as any mystery. Twelve years in the making, the novel has spawned numerous theater pieces and even has its own web site: www.hungersbride.com.

It all began with a dog attack. When I was in Mexico in 1988, the woman I was traveling with (and would one day marry) was attacked by a pack while out walking alone in a little beach town. A local man whose children had come very close to being attacked hunted down and killed the pack's leader. Nights, after his restaurant had closed, we would sit out in the patio, and he would often speak of Mexico's past. One night he said that there were two Mexican poets I must absolutely come to know. One was an Aztec poet-emperor of the 15th century, Nezahualcóyotl, or Fasting Coyote. The other was the 17th-century poet Juana Inés de la Cruz. Both are in Hunger's Brides. By then I had already begun work on a series of modern-day short stories on the theme of hunger. Beulah's hungers—for love, sex, meaning, connection—were at the heart of these stories. Two years later, I ran across a passage in Sor Juana's autobiographical writings that showed me I'd been working not on two projects but one all along.

From the moment I was first illuminated by the light of reason, my inclination toward letters has been so vehement that not even the admonitions of others… nor my own meditations have been sufficient to cause me to forswear this natural impulse that God placed in me…that inclination exploded in me like gunpowder….

Hunger's Brides is a story of two very different women, separated by three centuries, who in their different ways are wedded to this hunger for ultimate connection.

In a world of the ten-second sound bite, where does your novel fit in?

It doesn't take much of a stretch to see the ten-second sound bite as the oddity—the language of a technology and of television, in which brevity has the cardinal virtue of preserving time for advertising. I don't see it as the concern of literature to perpetuate or enshrine this—at least until it's been around for a couple of thousand years. English literature does spareness very well, but to say that brevity is the soul of the postmodern age—with its riot of contradictions—sounds to me like an affectation of Neoclassicism. And it's not just that the turbulence of the Baroque has so much to say to our time. The Golden Age of the Spanish Baroque coincides in both chronology and subject with the greatest period in our own literature, when the virtuosos of the English tongue were extending its expressive range to the utmost.

How does one write comfortably in such a—dare we say—Baroque style?

I myself was raised by people of Scots descent on the far western edge of the Great Plains. That combination of Puritan contempt for ornament and modern pseudoclassicism is like a straitjacket. I get laconic. I can find it beautiful. But it's a world trapped in too few notes. I think one writes in the styles of Hunger's Brides not so much comfortably as joyfully, with a sense of play and exhilaration. Maintaining readers' engagement is not the problem; it's giving them periods of rest, alternating voices and moods, setting things up in counterpoint to voices from our time.

Did you consciously echo Sor Juana in your writing?

I would often begin the day reading through her poetry, especially when seeking the right tone for a new chapter. Once I had this, the rhythms of that chapter's language were established. But I don't really think it was Sor Juana's writing style I was after so much as the language of her thought as I imagined it—mercurial, funny, tragic, brooding, acerbic. And then there's Mexico itself, of course: the surreal intensity of its imagery, its mythologies—and the drama of its landscapes.

This isn't just a novel, it's a multimedia event—the Hunger's Brides project. What would Sor Juana have thought?

Early on, when Hunger's Brides was about half written, it was adapted to the stage and toured to Mexico, where it was performed in the convent where Sor Juana lived out her life. The Baroque is dramatic—it has a keen sense of the role and perspective of the spectator. Watching the play performed in a chapel filled with Sor Juana specialists really brought home for me the story's dramatic potential. What would Sor Juana have thought? At the very least, she would have been intrigued. She was fascinated by optics and instruments, and she was a playwright. Some of her stage devices are startlingly postmodern. And as much as her poetry was admired, her company, apparently, was something to be treasured. Dignitaries fresh from Europe would often call directly at her convent before presenting themselves at court.

No matter how engaging this novel, some readers will inevitably whine, "Why so long?" What's your response?

Funny, I'd really expected a lot more of that, but readers have so far been the most pleasant surprise in a surprising run. It's not for everyone, of course, but when a big book is working, there are people who do not ever want it to end. Some read it in great gulps—the current record is seven days. Others have been generous enough to entrust to it a few minutes of their lives each night over a span of weeks. They trust it to deliver what no other medium can: depth, complexity, slow time. In other words, a concrete analog of our inner lives.