A stunning & wholly original debut Aug 12, 2007 (2 of 2 found this helpful)
Tales from the Town of Widows and Chronicles from the Land of Men is a feast for anyone who relishes beautiful, intelligent writing infused with humor and humanity.
Set against the backdrop of the Colombian civil war, it tells the story of a group of women living in a remote mountain village who are forced to fend for themselves after a band of Communist guerrillas descends on the village and forcibly recruits all the men, killing those who resist and leading the others away to fight for their cause. The women and children who are left behind must overcome their grief, fear, ignorance and passivity in order to survive and build a new society of their own on the patriarchal rubble of the old.
The book embodies many contradictions without ever pulling at the seams. It is at once lyrical and brutal, subversive and idealistic, satirical and affecting, wickedly funny and profoundly sad. It tackles big issues--religion, politics, sexual politics--but its real power lies in the poignant and often comic humanity of its characters, with their hairy, muscular legs and rectangular bodies, their migrating warts and luxurious mustaches. And those are just the women: the widows, spinsters, prostitutes and virgins who inhabit the town of Mariquita. We are also given, in journalistic chronicles at the end of each chapter, brief and often shocking glimpses of the men and boys doomed to fight in the war, and the civilians caught up in its senseless violence.
The book begins in 1992 and ends, 16 years later, in 1992. (Among the many innovations the women conceive is the concept of female time, which is based on the menstrual cycle and runs backwards. They also end up rejecting religion, making clothing optional and deciding that heterosexuality is over-rated.) Each chapter focuses on a particular woman: Doña Emilia, the madam of the village's whorehouse, who loses all her customers when the men are taken away; Cleotilde Guarnizo, the mannish, mustached schoolteacher with the stomping gait and mysterious past; Francisca viuda de Gómez, the widow who finds a fortune under her bed; Julia Morales, born Julio, whose mother dresses him as a girl to hide him from the guerrillas and who grows up to become the town beauty. But the main character, the unifying force of the village and of the book, is Rosalba viuda de Patiño, the widow of the town's police sergeant. Soon after the men are taken away, Rosalba is appointed Magistrate by a passing government soldier. It falls on her, an uneducated housewife with no leadership experience, to rouse the women from their grief and apathy and restore order, prosperity and hope to the village -- a seemingly impossible task that requires all her ingenuity and determination.
In the end, Rosalba and the other villagers create a new society based on the values of women: harmony, cooperation and respect for every individual, whether female or male, gay or straight, buck naked or wearing a red polka dot dress that's tight in all the right places. And when some of the village's men come home after their 16-year absence and try to reclaim their power and male prerogatives, things get really interesting...