Fire & Song, The Story of Luis de Carvajal
by Anna Lanyon
Publisher: Allen &Unwin
Review: Paul Burman
I am a greater fan of fiction than non-fiction. That said, I have to acknowledge that it was an old friend – Anna Lanyon – who, many years ago, persuaded me that non-fiction could be as powerful and creative a literature as the best literary fiction. She passionately argued the point over a few meals and bottles of wine, and gave me a copy of Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation, An Argument with my Mexican Father in order to try and prove it. However, she well and truly clinched the argument in 1999 when I read her first book, Malinche’s Conquest (Allen & Unwin).
Following Anna’s extensive travels in Mexico and Spain, Malinche’s Conquest does more than scratch beneath the folklore and vilification of the woman who, as Hernan Cortés’ Amerindian translator, concubine and mother to his son, played a central role in the Spanish Conquest of 1521. What the reader is presented with is a series of vibrant stories, based on painstaking research, that illuminate the woman Malinche was and the many conflicts she experienced. As an historian, translator, story-teller extraordinaire and inveterate traveller, Anna Lanyon takes us on a tour of modern Mexico, but it’s a tour in which she helps us peer beyond the shadows. Through her considerable knowledge and the clarity of her interpretation of innumerable documents, she shows us the colours that shaped that world half a millennium previously. Inevitably, along the way, greater truths are revealed about the world in which we currently live and the decisions we make.
by Paul Burman
