Did anyone have a favorite or especially telling description/passage from the book?
I thought it was touching and significant how the villagers' take on the Evertons, who resemble us more than the villagers, shed so much light on their quiet lifestyle:
"Lourdes says the senor and senora read their separate books, then stare out the window for ten minutes at a time."
And this was magnificent as a description of their home, or any home: "After the bishop left, they would return to their house, light their lamps, light their fire, and in this way reduce the world, spiritual and temporal, to a bright square space between four whitewashed walls."
The author is a master of domestic comfort. But I'd also like to hear her elaborate on this description from the chapter "The Baptists": "... a wanton girl, barefoot and merry, drifting on tides of perfumed air from sacrilege to sacrilege." (That's how I imagine the author as a young woman!)
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Good post. Needed the book to quote it, but I loved this: "From the east, where a moment ago there was nothing, runs a boy, and, for the first time, the Evertons witness a recurring Mexican phenomenon: the abrupt appearance of human life in an empty landscape."
Oh yes! I loved that, too.
There are so many brilliant passages. But I loved this:
Sara looked across the street, past the shoeshine stands where business was always slow this time of day, through the heliotrope blue of the jacarandas, past benches where old men and babies slept, to a stone-wreathed column commemorating the Constitution of 1917. She waited there for fifteen minutes, watching pedestrians as they appeared, picking out men who were almost as tall as Richard, almost as thin.
And the ending has to be one of the best I've ever read:
Stop, she wanted to call out. Stop for a minute. Look through these gates and see the lighted house. An accident has happened here. Remember the place. Bring stones.
As I was reading I looked up pictures of some of the plants she mentioned: jacarandas, mentioned in that passage you like, maguey cacti.
Yes, the ending is beautiful.
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