The Bullet Swallower
A woman’s red shawl blows off her grave and into a tree, where it turns into a red bird. A cruel and greedy landowner is born with sharp flecks of real gold in his eyes. Shot in the mouth, a bandit survives with a horrible scar and the nickname El Tragabalas, or the Bullet Swallower.
We’re in magic realism land. We’re also in a Western mostly set in the realistically described Tex-Mex borderlands about 1900, except…the mouth of Hell lies in Texas. We’re hugely enjoying Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s fabulous new novel, named for the bandit, which paints an unforgettable picture of a place and characters very far from most readers’ experience, either literary or literal.
As in most magic realism (now considered rather old-fashioned in Latin America but still going strong in El Norte), many of the unbelievable occurrences come straight from “real” life. “Everything in this book is true,” notes the author mischievously, “except the stuff I made up.” Her great-grandfather, she tells us, was indeed a bandido called the Bullet Swallower, later the hero of a Mexican movie. Now Gonzalez James has spun her family legend into a fantastic, gory, rollicking, roistering, shoot-em-up that’s also concerned with the nature of evil, whether it is inherited and whether later generations are bound to atone for or repeat the sins of their ancestors.
Gonzalez James writes a lively English laced with Spanish and a few collectible vocabulary words like “ouroboros” (a circular symbol of destruction and rebirth) and “fellowes” (the outer rim of a wheel), both of which perfectly express her darker themes. Compared to García Márquez she’s realistic; compared to Cormac McCarthy, she’s delightfully humorous. In fact, she’s quite unique—and quite wonderful.
