The Golden Chalice of Hunahpu: A Novel of the Spanish Attack on the Maya
The Spanish conquest of the Mayan civilization in the 16th Century forms the dramatic climax of William Vlach’s sweeping novel The Golden Chalice of Hunahpu, but the narrative is much more generous than that of simple military fiction; through a fascinating cast of disparate characters, Vlach dramatizes what he refers to as a “sixteenth-century American holocaust.” We see the doomed valor of Mayan prince Belehe Qat as he struggles to fight the invading Spanish (the savagery of that invasion is exceptionally well portrayed in these pages – so much so that there are stretches that make for very disturbing reading). We see the violently-widening world view of the Spanish noblewoman Beatriz (by a good measure the book’s most interesting character) as she follows her conquistador husband to his new assignment and is quickly forced to re-assess both him and herself.
Most entertaining of all (albeit in a very darkly sardonic way), we see the battered idealism of a monk named Domingo, whose personal story intersects with key historical events in ways that keep the story unpredictable. A host of secondary characters are equally well fleshed-out, and the lost world of the Maya is painted in all its sometimes contradictory colors. The book is barely three-hundred pages long but feels as satisfying as an epic three times that length. Recommended.
