I have a bad habit of trying to collate various books into loose niche groupings out of some perverted desire to do amateur comparative lit. With this in mind I could not help but compare Season of the Swamp to a few other novels that seem to share a similar premise. Season of the Swamp deals with an at the time unknown Benito Juarez, future President of Mexico and principal player in the downfall of the Second Mexican Empire. As I said before though this is a bit before that, and rather than in ascendancy Benito Juarez is in political exile in New Orleans around the 1850s and is dead broke. This is a similar enough beginning to those other books I mentioned, Faraway the Southern Sky by Joseph Andras and Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Enard. They too feature soon-to-be famous Ho Chi Minh and Leonardo da Vinci in foreign cities, be they Paris or Istanbul. All three books also are short, are self-aware in their fictionalizing, and feature the cities they take place in as a kind of character unto itself. Its obvious in a way why this scheme has appeared so much so recently, these obscure parts of the lives of great men leave a lot to play with in their under documented or in Enard's case completely fictionalized journeys abroad. In Herrera's case there's an uneasy balance struck and it feels like Juarez is lost within New Orleans itself.

Right from the beginning the book plays its messages on its sleeve, Benito Juarez comes fresh off the boat in New Orleans and gets a first hand view of a slave battered by the police. There is much horror in New Orleans for Benito, as much as there is much booze and heated political discussions in seedy coffee shops. New Orleans is written as a strange land where lawyers are bought off by mixed race concubines, bodies rot in canals and everything seems to come back to the trade of "hands", that is to euphemistically say slaves. The racial hierarchy delineates everything in the story, further setting Juarez with his Native American heritage who is obviously not white but also not black and thus an odd outsider to the system (there is one indigenous New Orleanian, he is the last of his kind).

Juarez is carried through New Orleans as a naive fish out of water being brought to face with enormous cruelty and bigotry with few comrades either Mexican or local, and it is that feeling of a kind of series of nightmarish vignettes that give me pause when I think of this novel. The whole thing is fairly short clocking in at about 160 pages and it is that shortness that gives a feeling like there is no room to breathe with the narrative. There are scene after scene of cynical Yankee factors in slave markets, underground abolitionists, raucous saloons that paint an engaging picture of the city antebellum but the engagement with Juarez feels wan and these scenes, though well written, can feel almost didactic in the lessons it is meant to impart to Juarez. There is a point where the aforementioned last Native American all but says to Juarez to not trust the French to which Juarez dopily says that the French are now a country of reason and are no longer the colonial nation they were, foreshadowing the French intervention in Mexico. There is a real great ambiance to the writing but the shortness and the sometimes over-bluntness makes it feel more like a carnival ride rushing through vistas in which Juarez is just as much a passenger as us. I wish it was perhaps slightly longer because the writing can be very evocative and engrossing but there feels like there is little time to ingest it with the pacing. For sure worth a read but there is a complicated feeling that this book nearly scratches greatness, if it just stayed still a little longer.

Season of the Swamp

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